A pretty printer is a mapping from terms to text. If this is done in a nice way, i.e., layout is placed in appropriate places, the formatter deserves the term pretty printer. For some applications, e.g., inspecting an intermediate term in a transformation pipeline, an ugly printer is sufficient.

pretty printers can be defined manually, but that is a lot of work. A better way is to use an intermediate format for representing layout instructions and leaving the actual formatting to a tool that knows about it.

The generic pretty printing (gpp) package that comes with StrategoXT provides tools for translating terms to the Box language^? and formatting the Box language^? to text, html, and latex. The package even supports generation of pretty print tables from SDF syntax definitions.

If you need more control over pretty printing you can also write a pretty printer with StrategoBox. This approach uses concrete syntax for the Box language^? inside the Stratego language.

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CategoryPrettyPrint^?