Creating the RLMeta poster

Published on 2020-05-24.

RLMeta is the most interesting program I've written. I find the grammar syntax beautiful to read and the meta-approach intriguing. To me, it approaches art. I wanted to showcase it by putting the whole implementation on a poster. Here is a preview:

Read on to learn how I created the poster and the RLMeta version displayed on it.

• Poster design
• RLMeta version
  • Remove string builder
  • Move error reporting out of support
  • Move assemble function to support
  • Compact and modify formatting
  • Have only one semantic action class
  • Allow unlimited splice
  • Redefine matching of character sequences
• Future posters
• Code listings for RLMeta
  • parser.rlmeta
  • codegenerator.rlmeta
  • support.py
  • compile.sh
  • meta_compile.sh

Poster design

I created the poster using Inkscape. I have used Inkscape on and off in the past, but I am by no means an expert. I used the inksyntax plugin to create syntax highlighted text.

To come up with the design for the poster, I started by creating text objects for each file in the implementation. Then I tried to fit them on a page. Portrait mode worked best since I did not want to break the VM implementation, which was the longest piece of text and determined the main layout of the poster. I also concluded that I needed three columns to fit all code and that I wanted them to be of equal width for symmetry. I modified the source code to better fit the poster layout. In particular I worked on reducing the number of lines of code. After a while, making the VM code shorter would not help to fit more on the page because I still needed three columns. I made lots of test printouts and edits. You can see some of them in the pictures below.