In need of a simple, powerful markup language

[Cs. Henk]

Hi!

Could you suggest an easy-to-use+write+read markup language which can be
rendered to html and and pdf easily and nicely?

* Not latex, because it doesn't clearly separate content and form
* Not docbook, because hand-writing xml is pain

but something similar in functionality...

And of course, it would be great if it were ruby-based or at least there
existed a ruby api / toolset to the language.

For purposes like writing easily maintainable and nice looking docs and
cv...

Thanks for any ideas/sharing experience.

Csaba

 

[Ken Kunz]

Two options you might consider are Textile and Markdown. Not sure
about support for rendering PDF. Also, take a look at Instiki (wiki
clone) -- it supports both Textile and Markdown, and also can export
pages to PDF (though it may be using a separate library for PDF
rendering).

Textile:
http://www.textism.com/tools/textile/
Textile reference:
http://hobix.com/textile/
Ruby implementation (RedCloth):
http://www.whytheluckystiff.net/ruby/redcloth/

Markdown:
http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/
Ruby implementation (BlueCloth):
http://bluecloth.rubyforge.org/

Instiki:
http://instiki.org/show/HomePage

Cheers,
Ken

 

[Steven Jenkins]

Could you suggest an easy-to-use+write+read markup language which can be
rendered to html and and pdf easily and nicely?

* Not latex, because it doesn't clearly separate content and form
* Not docbook, because hand-writing xml is pain

Have you looked at any XML editors (e.g.,
http://gnomedesktop.org/node/1151)? You don't have to hand-write XML to
use DocBook.

but something similar in functionality...

And of course, it would be great if it were ruby-based or at least there
existed a ruby api / toolset to the language.

I've done some messing around on a DocBook-to-LaTeX translator (in
Ruby). It's not really general--I use role attributes in DocBook
elements as hints to LaTeX--but it produces nice output for the subset
of DocBook I care about (specification documents produced from a system
engineering database). Let me know if you want to see it.

I was mulling over making a Ruby implementation of TeXmerge
(http://gnomedesktop.org/node/1151) but I probably won't ever get around
to it.

Steve