discuss: AsciiDoc, while we are at it
Subject:
AsciiDoc, while we are at it
From:
"Scot W. Stevenson" ####@####.####
Date:
10 Mar 2005 08:12:42 -0000
Message-Id: <42300174.1040102@possum.in-berlin.de>
Hi David,
> LinuxDoc is much easier to work with than DocBook.
Just about /anything/, including cuneiform script, is easier to work
with than DocBook. One of the reasons I keep postponing a revision of
the Mock Mainframe HOWTO is this feeling of dread when I think about
typing <para> one hundered times...
> Future editing of a doc will be a lot easier if it's in LinuxDoc.
Or, what the TLDP could actually do is join the 21th Century and finally
start accepting one the "plain text" source formats like AsciiDoc
http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/
as the default. These let you just write the thing with minimal
formating and leave all the markup crap to the computer where it belongs.
AsciiDoc would be an especially nice format for the TLDP because it
converts structured plain text to DocBook, so those of you who actually
enjoy DocBook can just type
asciidoc -b docbook sourcefile.txt
and keep on doing whatever it is you do. AsciiDoc also can be converted
to LinuxDoc and a whole host of other things such as various forms of
HTML. And "future editing" of plaintext is always going to be easier
than editing any sort of markup.
Besides AsciiDoc, there is reStructuredText as part of the DocUtils package
http://docutils.sourceforge.net/index.html
but the DocBook part is not finished yet, the website says.
The point for me as a human is: I don't want to have to deal with markup
at all, neither DocBook nor LinuxDoc nor LaTeX, any more than I
absolutely have to. I want to be able to concentrate on structure and
content of the text. There are tools out there to let me do just that --
tools that work on just about any system (both are Python based), with
just about any editor (including TextEdit with OS X and NotePad on
Windows, of course), and are GPL.
Unfortunately, the TLDP is not allowing us to use them. DocBook is one
of the problems here, not part of a solution.
Y, Scot
--
Scot W. Stevenson, probably someplace in Germany
