Leo Screenbook Maker
  • What is Leo /Leo/Basics/Books/B4_What_is_Leo/sbook.htm Leo is a unique, powerful computer program that you can use to organize, analyze and describe text and text files. Leo is a free program written by Edward K. Ream. For information about downloading Leo, see installation  tutorial in this series. Leo runs on Windows, Mac, or Linux.

    Use Leo:

    • to brainstorm a new project
    • as a Personal Information Manager
    • to add multiple outlines and commentary to any text file
    • as a tool to facilitate a new kind of literate programming.

    Because Leo is unlike other tools you may have used, a series of examples may be the best way to demonstrate what can be done with Leo.

    ]]>         What is Leo - Continued /Leo/Basics/Books/B6_What_is_Leo_-_Continued/sbook.htm In the first tutorial in this series, we saw the basic outlining and file derivation features of Leo. Let's take a further look at how Leo's derived file functions can be put to use. We will use the creation of a computer program as an example, however, the operations are useful in other situations involving  complex text documents.

    ]]>         Installation /Leo/Basics/Books/C2_Installation/sbook.htm Windows Users:

    Installing Leo requires two steps:

    1. Install Python: click here, save to your desktop, then double-click on the saved file.
    2. Install Leo: click here, save to your desktop, then double-click on the saved file.

    (Python is a type of software for creating and running computer programs.)

    Unix and Mac Users:

    Please continue to next page.

     

    Also, if you are a programmer and want to get the Leo files without using an installer, continue to the next page.

     

    ]]>         Outlining /Leo/Basics/Books/C4_Outlining/sbook.htm Here we have opened a new file in Leo.

    ]]>         Derived Files Part 1 /Leo/Basics/Books/Derived_Files_Part_1/sbook.htm Using directives you can make Leo extract text from any number of nodes to another file of your choosing. A directive is a simple command starting with the @ sign that you add to the text of the node. The directive directs Leo how to process the node. Directives are always the first word on a line.

    This tutorial will cover one way of doing this, which is to use the @root directive. A second tutorial will cover the @file directive.

    ]]>         Derived Files Part 2 /Leo/Basics/Books/Derived_Files_Part_2/sbook.htm Leo has a second way of creating derived files. This is the @file directive. This directive at first seems similar to the @root directive, but there is an important conceptual difference. When you use the @file directive, outline information is always written to the derived file. Therefore, you cannot use the @silent directive.

    The benefit of using the @file directive is that there is no longer any need to explicity tangle and untangle.  Tangling and untangling happen automatically by opening a .leo file and saving it. This makes alternating between Leo and another editor or IDE completely transparent.

    In addition, when you use the @file directive, you can have unnamed sections. To see how these work, read on...

    ]]>         The Evisa Site /Leo/Examples/Books/B4_The_Evisa_Site/sbook.htm This tutorial shows how using Leo greatly simplified the development of the language learning applications online at evisa.com, a multilingual information and learning site. (The .leo file containing the code for this application is not available for download, but the leo outline is illustrated via screenshots).

    First, let's take a look at how the site application works, and then we'll examine the .leo file that contains all of the code for the language applications.

    ]]>         Screenbook Maker XSLT /Leo/Examples/Books/B6_Screenbook_Maker_XSLT/sbook.htm The page that you are looking is an HTML page created by the Screenbook Maker program. Screenbook Maker makes it easy to create online tutorials with screenshots. It also automatically creates tables of contents, full text search pages, rdf files, and other resources.

    Before Screenbook Maker created this HTML page that you are reading now, however, it saved all of the text of this tutorial in an XML file. Then, it generates the HTML for this page from an XSLT template. But Screenbook Maker doesn't just create one HTML view of the tutorial. Screenbook Maker looks in the bookshelf folder (the folder containing the screenbook tutorials) for XSLT files. For every XSLT file that it finds there, it generates a different tutorial output.

    An XSLT template file is a text file that contains XSLT (a specialized language) instructions and other output text. A processor is used to take the XML file for the tutorial and create an output file based on the XSLT instructions and text in the XSLT template.

     

    ]]>         Perl Utilities /Leo/Examples/Books/B8_Perl_Utilities/sbook.htm Perl is a great language for many things, but one thing it really shines at is in making small programs for system administration. There is a huge library of components for system administration that you can use from Perl, and it is easy to do a lot with a small script.

    Scripts that are dashed off quickly to take care of small tasks tend not to be terribly readable and well documented, particularly in a language like Perl that has so many ways to pack a lot of functionality into a few statements. Such scripts also tend to proliferate, since often it can be faster to write a new script than find out whether a script already exists that can do the job.

    This tutorial provides an example of how using Leo can solve both of these problems. One sample script is presented, but it is easy to see how adding more scripts to this example outline could result in a package that is very well documented. Addind a new script to this outline would not take much more effort than dashing off a script in a standard text editor.

    ]]>         Flextable /Leo/Examples/Books/C8_Flextable/sbook.htm Flextable is a DHTML component you can use in your web pages to display data in a tabular form. This component has many features not available in HTML tables, such as click-sort, movable columns, frozen columns, resizable columns etc.

    Flextable only works with Internet Explorer 5.5 or later. If you are using IE 5.5+ you can view a sample page and other information here. A Leo file containing the component is also available from the same location.

    Flextable is distributed in an XSLT stylesheet. You use the stylesheet to process tabular XML, and the ouput is a DHTML page with the Flextable component.

     

    ]]>         A NSIS Installer for Python Applications /Leo/Examples/Books/D2_A_NSIS_Installer_for_Python_Applications/sbook.htm Nullsoft, the makers of the Winamp MP3 software, have released a powerful free installer called NSIS, available here. This application allows you to make installation packages for Windows applications.

    You create NSIS packages by writing a NSIS script and then compiling it. Depending on the application, NSIS can often be a better choice than more expensive installation generators, since NSIS installations are easy to create, are small and fast, and yet can be configured with many features.

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