[Fuego] About the reporting tool format

[Bird, Timothy]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Daniel Sangorrin on Tuesday, August 22, 2017 1:07 AM
>
> I hope that you were able to see the eclipse.

I did!  It was totally awesome!  Unlike anything I've seen before.
Even though I understood everything that happened intellectually,
there was something very special about experiencing it first hand.
 
OK - enough about my personal life... :-)

> I was thinking that it might be a good idea to produce reports in asciidoc
> format, which can then
> be converted to other formats. Is this what you have in mind as well?

Yes.  I had in mind to produce reports in a format that could be converted
to numerous other outputs.

With the gen-report command, I prototyped by directly producing ASCII text,
but that is just a proof of concept.  I may also directly produce HTML
in the short term, because it's relatively easy.  But in the long term I would
like to output something like ascii-doc so that the reports can then be transformed
into many other formats (well, primarily PDF and HTML).  Human-readable
reports will benefit from layout that is better-handled by a tool that performs
layout.  In other words, layout (things like column widths, table dimensions,
text wrapping, plot placement) is something that I don't think ftc should be doing
itself.

I would like to switch our online documentation to reStructuredText (and use
readthedocs to publish it on our web site).  So I think that is a strong contender
for the universal output I'd like to use.
 -- Tim