[HN Gopher] PreTeXt: Write Once Read Anywhere Authoring and Publ... ___________________________________________________________________ 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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-08-23 23:00 UTC)