Co-developers wanted: document markup language

R

Robert Kern

Wildemar said:
Yes, you're German. Have you ever noticed that (we) Germans are
virtually the only ones that feel the need to rub our nationality into
everyones faces? ;)

Howdy!

We Americans do the same. ;-)

--
Robert Kern

"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma
that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had
an underlying truth."
-- Umberto Eco
 
J

James Stroud

Torsten said:
Reading only forums and newsgroups, one may think that this is
impossible but in real life, I've seen more people using LaTeX
exactly once and never again than people who keep using it.

This is funny. I developed a pretty good competence in LaTeX to write my
thesis (which thanks to LaTeX, looked beautiful) and never once used
LaTeX again.

The biggest hurdle to these markup languages is collaborative documents
and that LaTeX and the like are impossible for collaborators to learn.
Yes, impossible, in the 0%-chance-of-ever-happening meaning. So you get
stuck with Word. This is the reality once you are passed writing term
papers.

James

--
James Stroud
UCLA-DOE Institute for Genomics and Proteomics
Box 951570
Los Angeles, CA 90095

http://www.jamesstroud.com/
 
W

Wildemar Wildenburger

Robert said:
Howdy!

We Americans do the same. ;-)
Weeell, you guys mostly rub your ignorance about the rest of the world
into everyones faces. That's a little different.

There, I did it. Now I got my country invaded. But maybe that's a good
thing ... at least we will get democracy and finally find happiness.

/W
(OK, sorry. I couldn't resist. Don't take it personally. Take it
nationally. ;) )
 
E

Evan Klitzke

Some LaTeX users in Aachen thought about a general-use markup
language this spring. I wrote some code and a rough project
description, however, we could need some help.

Torsten,

I have another question about your markup language. Are there any
plans on adding provisions for layout and positioning? The difficulty
of learning advanced layout has been one of my major frustrations with
LaTeX (I'm referring to LaTeX's weird box system, I'm not sure exactly
what the proper terminology for it is).
 
T

Torsten Bronger

Hallöchen!

Evan said:
I have another question about your markup language. Are there any
plans on adding provisions for layout and positioning? The
difficulty of learning advanced layout has been one of my major
frustrations with LaTeX (I'm referring to LaTeX's weird box
system, I'm not sure exactly what the proper terminology for it
is).

I don't know exactly what you mean but the answer is probably no.
For example, I want the author to state the title, keywords, etc of
his document, however, he should not state that he wants the title
printed centred and 4cm from the top of the page.

The latter is defined in the "theme" which will be given as a set of
ordinary LaTeX commands (for the LaTeX backend).

Tschö,
Torsten.
 
J

Jeremy Sanders

Torsten said:
I don't know exactly what you mean but the answer is probably no.
For example, I want the author to state the title, keywords, etc of
his document, however, he should not state that he wants the title
printed centred and 4cm from the top of the page.

The latter is defined in the "theme" which will be given as a set of
ordinary LaTeX commands (for the LaTeX backend).

Isn't the problem that making such a theme will be very hard?

One of the annoying things about LaTeX is lack of control over positioning
(e.g. floats, page breaks...). The one thing most LaTeX users moan about is
trying to get their document to fit into an n page limit (e.g. for a
proposal). Maybe the theme could have some options to control spacing,
however, like some sort of CSS.

I think the one thing that would improve LaTeX is orthogonality in its
commands (e.g. why no 8pt option for the document, why the crazy \small,
\LARGE, etc commands?), and fixing the font system to be based around
modern fonts. Finally making bibtex part of the core and making it easy to
use would be great.
 
T

Torsten Bronger

Hallöchen!

Jeremy said:
Isn't the problem that making such a theme will be very hard?

Well, it will be a lot of work because there are so many elements
but there is no high complexity. There will be a standard LaTeX
backend, and further backends can be built of top of that so that
for some of them, only very little extra code is necessary.
One of the annoying things about LaTeX is lack of control over
positioning (e.g. floats, page breaks...). The one thing most
LaTeX users moan about is trying to get their document to fit into
an n page limit (e.g. for a proposal).

Well, trying to meet a page limit is a more exotic requirement in my
opinion. Anyway, apart from the theme and some parameters that you
can pass to it, there will be a LaTeX cfg file which, if present in
the document directory, will be inserted directly before
"\begin{document}". This is a quick and simple way for LaTeX
wizards to configure the LaTeX process. In this file, you can set a
smaller lineskip and a tighter font, for example.
Maybe the theme could have some options to control spacing,
however, like some sort of CSS.

At least *I* won't include a CSS parser, escpecially not for the
document source file. My aim is to keep the list of parameters for
the backend a one-liner for most documents. Themes may recognize
arbitrary many parameters but the standard themes will know only a
few (paper size, margins, font/fontsize, columns, one/twoside, and a
few more).

Of course, a third-party theme may use CSS for LaTeX, possibly the
very same CSS file which is used for the accompanying HTML backend.
I think the one thing that would improve LaTeX is orthogonality in
its commands (e.g. why no 8pt option for the document, why the
crazy \small, \LARGE, etc commands?),

(There is the extsizes package.) I understand "orthogonality" as
the independence of features, and by and large this is true for
LaTeX. \small is not for *global* font changes after all. You may
miss completeness, well, Gummi will surely offer even less, which I
think is one of its chances. I certainly miss homogeneity in LaTeX
(for example, 10-12pt is in the standard classes, 8-20pt is in
extsizes), and in this respect, Gummi will offer much more.
and fixing the font system to be based around modern
fonts. Finally making bibtex part of the core and making it easy
to use would be great.

This is another opportunity: You can hide the toolchain (well, this
is done by LaTeX editors, too) and implementation uglinesses from
the author. By the way, Gummi will use the new biblatex package for
the bibliography. It's really a relief to abandon the notorious
BibTeX style language for good.

Some people asked me whether it wouldn't be better to improve LaTeX
instead, however, this would make possible only a small fraction of
these goals. BibTeX is a good example: Its syntax is utter crap,
and even with biblatex you have to learn how to use the outdated
7bit (sometimes 8bit) format of bib files. The whole LaTeX system
is immutably optimised for English letters. Aleph will ease this
somewhat sometime. In Gummi, the only thing left of all this is
that "en" is the default document language.

Tschö,
Torsten.
 
B

bambam

virtually the only ones that feel the need to rub our nationality into

I'd always assumed (I never spent much time) that Germans were
another culture that had the habit of greeting groups on entrance.

Australians, English, and most of North America just don't have
that habit.

Steve.
 
S

Steve Holden

Wildemar said:
Weeell, you guys mostly rub your ignorance about the rest of the world
into everyones faces. That's a little different.

There, I did it. Now I got my country invaded. But maybe that's a good
thing ... at least we will get democracy and finally find happiness.

/W
(OK, sorry. I couldn't resist. Don't take it personally. Take it
nationally. ;) )

Unfortunately Americans are also well known for their inability to
detect irony, so your pointed remarks about democracy and happiness will
probably go mostly unnoticed.

regards
Steve
--
Steve Holden +1 571 484 6266 +1 800 494 3119
Holden Web LLC/Ltd http://www.holdenweb.com
Skype: holdenweb http://del.icio.us/steve.holden
--------------- Asciimercial ------------------
Get on the web: Blog, lens and tag the Internet
Many services currently offer free registration
----------- Thank You for Reading -------------
 
L

Lawrence D'Oliveiro

TeX/LateX have been around forever and are well established standards,
as awful as they are. Why do we want ANOTHER markup language? We
need fewer, not more.

Because time marches on, and the deficiencies of the old way of doing things
become more obvious, not less. For all the wonderful layout capabilities of
TEX, I've never seen a decent font done with METAFONT--not a single one.
They all looked like rubbish compared to what was available with those
early PostScript-based Apple LaserWriters.

By the way, did you know there was life before TEX? Back in that era, the
main open-source markup system in use was ... troff. Still not quite dead
today, it lives on in the definition of Unix/Linux man pages.
 
R

Roy Smith

Lawrence D'Oliveiro said:
By the way, did you know there was life before TEX? Back in that era, the
main open-source markup system in use was ... troff. Still not quite dead
today, it lives on in the definition of Unix/Linux man pages.

I would hardly call troff "open source", at least not "back in that era".
When I first started using roff and nroff, you had to sign all sorts of
non-disclosure paperwork to get a copy of Unix. It wasn't until much later
that things like the BSD and GNU projects started coming out with open
source versions.

Of course, the whole roff family is based on the old runoff program (which
in turn was probably based on something else).

Anybody remember Scribe?
 
D

David Bolen

Roy Smith said:
Anybody remember Scribe?

(raising hand)

OT, but I still have a bunch of Scribe source documents from college.

Of course, as I attended CMU where it originated I suppose that's not
unusual. Definitely pre-WYSIWYG, but one of the first to separate
presentation markup from structure (very much in line with later stuff
like SGML from IBM although I don't recall the precise timing relation
of the two), including the use of styles.

I personally liked it a lot (I think the markup syntax is easier on
the eyes than the *ML family). If I remember correctly, for a while
there, it was reasonably common to see Scribe-like markup in
newsgroups (e.g,. "@begin(flame)" and @end("flame") or "@b[emphasis]")
before SGML/XML/HTML became much more common ("<flame> ... </flame>").

-- David
 

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