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Author Topic: Online version of The Form Letter Machine coming soon..  (Read 9930 times)

mouser

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Online version of The Form Letter Machine coming soon..
« on: November 02, 2009, 04:19 AM »
The initial version of the online version of the Form Letter Machine is now working(!)

Here's a little teaser, though you can see from this i have quite a bit of work to do improving formatting, polishing, etc.:
Screenshot - 11_2_2009 , 4_27_14 PM.pngOnline version of The Form Letter Machine coming soon..

I am however, very excited about it.

Tree documents are written in XML, and main document text blocks fade in and out as they are enabled/disabled -- which actually serves a purpose here, showing you which text is being added or removed.

In an improvement to the desktop version, you'll notice in the screenshot a block for Input Variables at the top.  These lines to let you specify free form inputs are automatically hidden and revealed as needed, based on references to those variables in the text body.

You can also define as many output block areas as you want -- so you can have a main body of the document, and then extra blocks like an appendix, etc.

I'll also just note, incase it's not clear, that the main point of putting this online is that people will be able to create, revise, and share these documents.  I'm hoping people will produce treeform documents that let people build their own custom Open Source Licenses, by mixing and matching terms and paragraphs, or legal documents, or just funny joke letters, etc.

I have quite a bit more work to do on it, but i'd be happy to entertain suggestions and feature requests.  I will open it up to initial testing later in the month.  I'd love to find some people who were willing to make some actual useful public tree form documents for the system before the official launch.
« Last Edit: November 02, 2009, 04:29 PM by mouser »

mouser

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Re: Online version of The Form Letter Machine coming soon..
« Reply #1 on: November 02, 2009, 11:09 PM »
A slightly updated picture:
Screenshot - 11_2_2009 , 11_07_13 PM.pngOnline version of The Form Letter Machine coming soon..

mouser

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Re: Online version of The Form Letter Machine coming soon..
« Reply #2 on: November 04, 2009, 04:12 AM »
An online teaser:
http://www.tfdocs.com/form/sample-form

Click on the "View XML Source" button to see the definition of the tree form document which describes the tree and the output.
« Last Edit: November 04, 2009, 10:44 AM by mouser »

superboyac

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Re: Online version of The Form Letter Machine coming soon..
« Reply #3 on: November 04, 2009, 10:48 AM »
I've always liked this program.  I've thought of a lot of potential uses for it.

mouser

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Re: Online version of The Form Letter Machine coming soon..
« Reply #4 on: November 04, 2009, 11:03 AM »
I'm locking this thread and moving it to the new tfdocs section: https://www.donation...ndex.php?board=285.0