Re: [lmi] Variables synthesized in 'pdf_command_wx.cpp'

[Greg Chicares]

[BTW, let me explicitly confirm your assumption that in the great majority
of cases I'd mentioned, I'm not asking you to do anything. But lambdas
could be interesting...]

On 2019-02-03 00:48, Vadim Zeitlin wrote:
> On Sat, 2 Feb 2019 23:52:56 +0000 Greg Chicares <address@hidden> wrote:
[...]
> GC> shortened strings:
> GC>     add_abbreviated_variable("CorpName", 60);
> GC>     add_abbreviated_variable("CorpName", 50);
> GC>     add_abbreviated_variable("CorpName", 140);
[...]
> GC> Similarly, could a 'width=' attribute be used here?

[...no, because characters have different widths, but...]

>  OTOH I did think about adding some generic mechanism for getting first N
> characters of any existing variable, e.g. writing the interpolation
> function in such a way that requesting "Foo_first_N" would return the
> substring of (at most) N leading characters of the result of interpolating
> "Foo". But it looked like a hack (probably because it is)

Agreed. We already have suffixes like "_Guar", and compounding that
complication would be like repeating a bad joke.

> [...] Or we could just implement support for
> Mustache lambdas or Handlebars block helpers which both basically allow
> applying arbitrary functions to the variable values and then we could use
> something like {{First(CorpName, 60)}} instead. But this would require
> slightly more effort, of course.

That's a really attractive idea. It doesn't have to be done at this moment,
and it'll probably entail a lot of effort. But let me make a "wish list":

* "{{First(CorpName, 60)}}" as above. Maybe the name should be {{Abbrev}}
because we'll never want {{Last}}, and we might want to mark abbreviated
strings something like this:
-  This is the full, very lengthy, verbose string.
+  This is the full...

* {{IfNonempty}}, so that where we have something like this:
  {{#HasWP}}
    <p>The Waiver of Monthly Charges Rider provides for waiver
    of monthly charges in the event of [...] </p>
  {{/HasWP}}
we could move the text into a '.product' file, then print it iff it's
not null. (AIUI, perhaps incorrectly, MST expands an empty string to
some kind of whitespace.)

* Some kind of if...elif...else; IIRC, handlebars has that already.

* Simple arithmetic, e.g. {{Add(MecYear), 1}} instead of defining an
auxiliary variable {{MecYearPlus1}}. Even an {Origin1} function that
returns one plus its argument would be useful.