Post a Comment On: Only Python

About a month ago, my second computer (actually, my main computer as the kids had taken over the better one) died. I had saved the hard-drive and managed tonight to recover the data on it. I found the beginning of a "standard" tutorial (in French) that I had started to write so that my kids could learn Python. That was in August 2004. Shortly afterwards, I discovered Guido van Robot and got inspired to create RUR-PLE. I worked fairly steady on it for a year and then, somehow, haven't been able to find the time to work on it for the past few months.

While I have been quite please with RUR-PLE in general, I have found one thing less than satisfactory: RUR-PLE uses wxPython and wxHtmlWindow to display its tutorial. [Image]Unfortunately, wxHtmlWindow does not support style sheets, but only simple html tags. My French tutorial made use of all kinds of css tricks in an attempt to have a pleasant look. I had to gave that up and hard-code font information in the tutorial that has been included with RUR-PLE.

I have found the result with wxHtmlWindow and hard-coded fonts to be somewhat disappointing. So, today I decided that I had to try and implement some work-around so that at least I could use style-sheets to colorize the source code and headings. I have made some limited progress and I hope to have something working soon, so that I can 1. change the existing lessons so that they use some (limited) styles instead of hard-coded font information, and 2. go back to writing some more lessons and get to version 1.0!

Note: I know of the existence of wxMozilla, but haven't been able to get it to work last time I tried. RUR-PLE, which is geared towards beginners (or teachers!) already require three separate installs (Python, wxPython, and itself!). I find this is already a bit much. Besides, if I haven't been able to get wxMozilla to work on my computer, how could I expect a complete beginner to do it?...