[Haskell-cafe] [ANNOUNCE] Fmark markup language

[José Lopes]

Hello Richard,

When you say "(for) some people (...) you special syntax is not natural"
that's a good thing. I want these people involved in the project. I want
to understand what they find natural in order to weigh the options and
make a proper decision.

On the README file in the github page you will find a brief explanation
of the markup elements. I need to elaborate you that though because
I feel I explain it too fast.
https://github.com/jabolopes/fmark

Let me answer your questions about sections. The amount of indentation
is not fixed. You can use whatever you want. There is also no nesting limit
in Fmark, however, there is a nesting limit in the Latex backend. For now,
quotations, block quotes, source code embedding, etc, are not implemented.
Those will be added in the future.

About embedding a Fmark document in another document. That seems to
be a very cool feature. I will definitely think about it! Maybe you can come
up with a "natural" way of doing it?

Cheers,
José


On 18-09-2012 06:19, Richard O'Keefe wrote:
> On 18/09/2012, at 3:57 PM, José Lopes wrote:
>> The problem with Fmark is also its greatest feature. While other markup languages
>> introduce special syntactic characters to give meaning to the document's elements,
>> I would like to take a different approach: I want to use characters that people already
>> use in document writing to achieve the same result. For example, in Mediawiki a
>> heading is some text surrounded by equal signs. But in Fmark a heading is simply some
>> text that does not end in a punctuation character, such as period or an exclamation mark.
>> I argue that this is a more "natural" approach.
> The problem with that is that some people DO end some headings with
> a full stop; for them your special syntax is not natural.
>> I want to find a natural way of not burdening the user with the task of having to learn
>> some special syntax in order to write a document.
> You haven't found it.  What you *have* is very special syntax expressed using
> several methods, AND IT IS NOT DOCUMENTED.  I have read the examples, and I can
> find nothing explaining what the syntax is.
>
> For example, I find indenting subsections rather unnatural and error-prone.
> (For example, moving a paragraph from a deep location to a shallow one would
> create a new subsection unintentionally.)
> Is the amount of indentation fixed?  How many levels of subsections are
> supported?  What if I want to use indentation to express quotation instead?
> How do I embed source code?  How can you get an example of Fmark in an
> Fmark document without having it acted on?  I could go on and on with
> questions about syntax.
>
>

-- 
José António Branquinho de Oliveira Lopes
Instituto Superior Técnico
Technical University of Lisbon

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