“Now he’s completely lost it” is probably what a regular reader might think. After all, I use plain text (Markdown) as the “single source of truth”1 in my document workflow,2 and now I want proper charts for visualization. Not ASCII bars. Actual pie charts. The kind managers and decision-makers expect. That sounds like a fundamental contradiction. I would argue it is not. In fact, I solved it in a clean way. Read more

Over the past few days, I once again disappeared down the proverbial rabbit hole. But let’s start from the beginning. On Saturday, I wrote a blog post to outline an automated and deterministic document workflow.1 To make it easier to follow, I also set up a Codeberg repository.2 The feedback was unexpectedly overwhelming and raised many valid points. The repository itself had been put together quickly rather than thoroughly, so I ended up revising it significantly and renaming it in the process. It is no longer just a demo. It now represents a complete, highly flexible, and at the same time very simple document workflow. Read more

The last two days I improved my own architecture and extended everything with a PDF workflow. If you like, you may download my larger blog series from the previous year in one piece as a PDF file and read them offline, a total of 75+ pages of condensed facts: Corona Warning App Home Office Workplaces Macbook Revival Come on, PDFs for old articles? Seriously? Well these are just test-balloons and working examples for my new PDF workflow. With the help of Pandoc, Git, Bash and Xelatex I have been able to achieve a significant improvement. The three linked PDFs are 100% automatically created from the content of this blog without my intervention. In future, this workflow will also be used for audits, documentation or other articles for third parties. Read more