Pretty Printer

A PrettyPrinter is a mapping from terms to text. If this is done in a nice way, i.e., layout is placed in appropriate places, the formatter deserves the term _pretty_-printer. For some applications, e.g., inspecting an intermediate term in a transformation pipeline, an UglyPrinter is sufficient.

PrettyPrinters can be defined manually, but that is a lot of work. A better way is to use an intermediate format for representing layout instructions and leaving the actual formatting to a tool that knows about it.

The GenericPrettyPrinting package that comes with StrategoXT provides tools for translating terms to the BoxLanguage^? and formatting the BoxLanguage^? to text, html, and latex. The package even supports generation of PrettyPrintTables from SDF syntax definitions.

If you need more control over pretty printing you can also write a PrettyPrinter with StrategoBox. This approach uses ConcreteSyntax for the BoxLanguage^? inside the StrategoLanguage .

-- EelcoVisser - 28 Nov 2001

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CategoryPrettyPrint^?