Looking for lightweight document description language for printing

Question

I'm looking for a very lightweight document description language, which can be easyly parsed in C. The purpose is printing of small documents or labels similar to cash register receipts. I need only basic formatting features for font settings, alignment and insertion of predefined variables.

Any ideas? Would using of some subset of rtf be a good choice?

Answer 1

I'd say go for something XML-based (plenty of good fast premade parsers, including for plain C), and probably a tiny subset of XHTML Transitional so as not to reinvent the wheel - <font name="..." color="..."> and such. RTF is not really much easier to parse, but is very human unfriendly.

Answer 2

I suggest to have a look at the gd library. Just create a simple script language yourself with one GD command per line.

Answer 3

Would also vote for XML and maybe XPS, if your needs are more advanced

Answer 4

Why not Markdown, the markup language of Stackoverflow?

Answer 5

Microsoft has defined a Report Definition Language designed for small reports, receipts, and such. Visual Studio can create RDL files, but it is an open standard and there are open source implementations of RDL report generators.