Ppgen translator done, some bugs found

I finished the ppgen translator this afternoon. In order to verify it works I had to download and run the ppgen program itself, which proved quite simple. You just go get it from its github page, a big single Python module, and run it. I started to read it but decided instead to treat it as a black box. While I respect the effort that RFrank continually pours into supporting it, there are things about its design, and its documentation, that irk me as a professional writer and programmer. So if I start to read it I will just be picking nits and thinking of how it should be done, and that's unproductive of my time. Worse, I could sucked into helping maintain it. Run away!

Anyway, during the testing I found some things that couldn't be accounted for in my Translator code (which turned out to be pretty simple, less than 300 lines with lots of comments). Investigation led to two small bugs in the PPQT Translator support itself. There was one logic error that resulted in generating a spurious blank line preceding any no-reflow section. I am not sure why I never noticed that until these tests.

The other had to do with the YAPP-generated document parser. The way it was written, the following perfectly normal input,

...end of a paragraph.

<tb>

Start of next paragraph...

was wrongly parsed as if the second paragraph was a section head. In the DP document format a section head is marked by two preceding empty lines. There was only one preceding blank line here, why was it being parsed as a head?

Every production (other than the thought-break, which was a late addition to the parser) ended with EMPTY? to absorb any empty line that followed them. For example, a no-reflow section was defined as XOPEN (LINE | EMPTY)* XCLOSE EMPTY?. So if the user wrote

/X
stuff...
X/

New paragraph...

the blank line after the X/ line would be absorbed into the NOFLOW section. Because of my doing that in all cases, the syntax of a HEAD3 was just EMPTY PARA, or one empty line and a paragraph. When I belatedly remembered the thought-break markup and added it, I forgot to define it as absorbing an optional empty line after it. That was easy to add, a two-line fix. With the other bug, a total of 4 or 5 lines changed. But that mandates repackaging the whole app again, sigh. Although that isn't really so bad, a few hours of work, most of which is spent waiting for files to upload to or download from the dropbox, so I can be doing other things.

That will be Thursday. Before I do it I'll review the issues list, there may be a couple of other easy fixes I should do.