[HN Gopher] PreTeXt: Write Once Read Anywhere Authoring and Publ...
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       PreTeXt: Write Once Read Anywhere Authoring and Publishing System
        
       Author : teleforce
       Score  : 29 points
       Date   : 2023-08-23 02:04 UTC (20 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (pretextbook.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (pretextbook.org)
        
       | jxy wrote:
       | Their code README says
       | 
       | > PreTeXt is guided by the following principles:
       | 
       | > 1. PreTeXt is a markup language that captures the structure of
       | textbooks and research papers.
       | 
       | > 2. PreTeXt is human-readable and human-writable.
       | 
       | When did XML become human readable and writable?
        
         | zetalyrae wrote:
         | XML is a great choice for this because it's a _markup_
         | language: it 's designed for adding structure and formatting
         | information to documents in a way that's generic and
         | extensible.
         | 
         | Something like Markdown is too spartan for all the kinds of
         | things you need to make a technical document.
        
           | MilStdJunkie wrote:
           | Yeah, Markdown's not really a print document format. But LMLs
           | (lightweight markup) don't begin and end with Markdown.
           | 
           | Asciidoc, on the other hand . . I've written aircrew flight
           | checklists, component maintenance manuals, typescript
           | developer documentation, illustrated parts catalogues,
           | maintenance handbooks, operation guides, and a good-old-
           | fashioned novelette in Asciidoc. Last few years with VSC.
           | It's fast as hell. I got Asciidoc include for re-use, I got
           | Asciidoc conditionals, VSC snippets, I got a billion other
           | toys like textql, diagrams, wireviz.
           | 
           | And yeah yeah yeah, I know, it's cheating: Asciidoc is
           | DocBook, DocBook is XML. Except Asciidoc's not XML. Asciidoc
           | renders in Chrome/Firefox/Edge extensions, Ruby, JS, Python,
           | and it exports to DocBook, LaTeX, PDF, HTML5, ePub, MOBI, MSO
           | via DocToolChain or Pckr and, well, hell, bring in Pandoc if
           | you want something else. When it comes to the Asciidoc tools,
           | I can go from bare metal to full-up publishing environment in
           | ten minutes. And how do I render DocBook again?
           | 
           | Oh, the XML pipelines. Those pipelines.
           | 
           | Schemas breaking XML spec[1], "XML-aware" diff/merge,
           | whitespace[2], sneaky goddamn proprietary entities[3],
           | namespaces, 1NF, computability[4], charset, semantic-less,
           | hierarchy fetishism, etc etc etc blabbity blabbity blah.
           | 
           | I just realized this post sounds really frickin' angry, and I
           | want to take a line here to say that I love all ya'll, but
           | XML publishing has left some scars, and I'm sorry about that.
           | 
           | [1] "Leading whitespace in attributes? CHARMING"
           | 
           | [2] No such thing as "officially normalized" when it comes to
           | XML whitespace, which means no lines, no tabs, no spaces.
           | 
           | [3] Goddamn REVBARS
           | 
           | [4] Ah, infinite arbitrary nesting, what a perfect fit for
           | natural language
        
             | bobbylarrybobby wrote:
             | +1 asciidoc is where it's at. Given its strengths and
             | similarity to markdown, I wonder why it hasn't taken off to
             | the same extent.
        
               | mdaniel wrote:
               | the most famous example I know of:
               | https://docs.atlas.oreilly.com/writing_in_asciidoc.html
        
             | mdaniel wrote:
             | Also, in case it matters to anyone: IJ plugin!
             | https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/7391-asciidoc (Apache
             | 2: https://github.com/asciidoctor/asciidoctor-intellij-
             | plugin/b... )
        
           | MattPalmer1086 wrote:
           | XML may be a good choice to markup the structure and
           | formatting of a technical document.
           | 
           | That doesn't make it a good human readable and writable
           | format.
        
             | macintux wrote:
             | Notice that the description didn't say it was a _good_
             | format in that regard.
        
               | MattPalmer1086 wrote:
               | Aha, very true! It is human readable and writeable after
               | all, just not very pleasant.
        
             | joshmarinacci wrote:
             | The ideal interface would be a WYSIWYM (what you see is
             | what you _mean_ ) word processor like app that let you edit
             | the markup visually, but using a semantic representation
             | rather than strict WYSIWYG. Thus you can write without
             | having to know too much of the syntax, but still be
             | producing strict markup. I recall such editors existing
             | about 20 years ago. I guess the market for XML tool died.
        
               | chrisweekly wrote:
               | You just described Obsidian. Its UX atop .md files is
               | simply amazing.
        
       | xbar wrote:
       | Nice. It far exceeds my write-only publishing system
        
       | juliangmp wrote:
       | Now this did intrigue me quite a lot until the very second I
       | looked at the example's "source code" and saw it's all XML.
        
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       (page generated 2023-08-23 23:00 UTC)