Software Development
A lot of the software we develop is intended for publication to the public. Whenever possible, we produce open source software, licensed under the GNU General Public License V3.0.
Plain Text Projects
We currently work on several projects focused on simplifying the format hell in seemingly trivial every-day tasks through the use of plain text formats. The primary goal of these projects is to produce data that is simple, well-structured, version-controllable, suitable for long-term archiving and useful as input to another, as yet unknown, program. Decisions on what file formats to use adhere as closely as possible to the recommendations of the Research Data Management and Digital Curation Office of ETH Library.
Turandot
The primary purpose of Turandot is the conversion of text files. It is a bit similar to pandoc, though it has a much more narrow focus on one specific conversion process: the conversion of Markdown into PDF with layout and styling defined by CSS. The process simple through a graphical user interface and a single-file template format. It is nevertheless powerful, supporting various Markdown extensions, two different templating engines, KaTeX formulas, automatic syntax highlighting for source code and a lot more. It's also capable to automatically render bibliographic references by parsing a CSL file and reading bibliographic data directly from Zotero or a CSLJSON file.
| Turandot@GitLab |
| Releases |
acc
First planned as a simple tool chain for easing the work with the plain text accounting software hledger, acc evolved into some sort of plain-text ERP system. It's capable of keeping track of your customers, employees, expenses and invoices via YAML files that can be edited by hand or manipulated using the GUI. Planned features include importing bank statements (via ISO 20022 camt), generating hledger account records based on its data and a PDF export for further archiving.
| GUI: | AccGTK@GitLab |
| Library: | accthymemodels@GitLab |
Cloudmark
A php/js based system to present and prettily display markdown files with the long term goal to free us all from dreadful Microsoft PowerPoint. Cloudmark wraps remark.js and markdown-it with a file browser, a responsive interface and a SSE based api to sync presentation between multiple devices. Cloudmark relies only on techonologies, that are usually available on any shared web host and can therefore be deployed easily in many environments.