On 18 September 2012 13:57, José Lopes <[email protected]> wrote: > Hello Kris, > > Thank you for your email. > > At this moment, Fmark is not as powerful as Markdown, also because Fmark > just started. > Markdown offers things such as Blockquotes, Lists, Code blocks, links, > emphasis, images, etc. > Fmark does not offer as many features: for now, there are only paragraphs, > headings, > subsections (endless nesting) and footnotes. In the near future, I want to > bolds/italics, > ordered and unordered lists, links, and later on as many elements as > possible :) > > 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.
Is it possible to override this? What happens if I want a heading of "This is the greatest Heading Ever!!!!!" ? "Natural" conventions seem to be to be rather hacky and with lots of corner cases; I think it's better to define a specific syntax for markup (e.g. what is the "natural" way of emphasising text?) and stick to it (though I agree that Markdown has some odd choices; in particular, the ability to use both _ and * for italics whilst requiring ** for bold). > > 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. Instead I want to find > "natural" ways > of writing and use those ways to reconstruct the elements in a document. Of > course, > what is natural is subjective and that is why I want to find a good tradeoff > between > expressiveness and simplicity in the syntax. For example, in Fmark a > footnote is some > text surrounded by square brackets. Maybe you find this natural, maybe you > don't. If a > handful of people defend a more natural way of writing footnotes I want to > implement > the way they say. If there is a more natural way of doing this I want to > find it. But for now > I think square brackets are better than the equal signs or any other strange > syntactic > character such as exclamation marks and so on... > > Another thing about Fmark is styles. I want to use fmark personally to write > papers, using > Latex as backend. While experimenting with previous versions of Fmark I > realized that I > could not specify the title, the author, the date, and the abstract. which > are essential in a > paper. I came up with an idea which I think is quite interesting. I wrote > another document > also using Fmark which only had the words "Title", "Author", "Date", and > "Abstract". And > then I combined these two documents together, such that, Fmark associated > title, author, > date and abstract, with the corresponding content. I thought the idea was > interesting > because the content and style documents have both the same structure and are > both > written in Fmark. Of course, there is still a long way to go, in order to be > able to fully > customize a document. > > But styles are a good and simple approach, similar to document classes in > Latex: the idea is > to write one document (content) and then use multiple (predefined, user > defined) styles, such > as, article, report, etc, to stylize your document. Another interesting > thing I have been thinking > about (but not implemented yet) is recursion in document styling. In a way, > weaving a style > with content can be compared to matching a regular expression. > > Anyway, these are just some key ideas. I see Fmark as a work in progress and > in a way as a > research project, trying to find a natural way of writing documents while > escaping as much > as possible from the syntax of a programming language. I also have a > metagoal with this > project: if my father (the non programming guy) could use it to write his > PhD dissertation, > I would be quite happy :) > > If you have any more questions I would be happy to answer. > But if you're interested in using markup languages for blogs perhaps a HTML > backend > in Fmark would be more interesting for you. Although, XML + JavaScript + CSS > is also possible. > > Best regards, > José > > > On 18-09-2012 04:25, Kristopher Micinski wrote: >> >> Jose, >> >> So I'm interested to hear you opinion on this as well... >> >> I use Pandoc with Markdown through Hakyll, which allows you to do a >> fair amount of cute things that are just really helpful for >> maintaining a blog (for example..). But I didn't get this from >> reading your github readme: what makes your markup language special? >> Could you give an example of how the language is more expressive than >> (say) markdown processed through Pandoc (I only mention because it >> lets you process LaTeX, very helpful, right...) or something >> comparable? >> >> kris >> >> On Mon, Sep 17, 2012 at 11:09 PM, José Lopes <[email protected]> >> wrote: >>> >>> Hello everyone, >>> >>> I just wanted to share a package I created called Fmark, now available >>> on HackageDB. >>> >>> Feedback both on the project and on the code is greatly appreciated :) >>> >>> Fmark (Friendly Markup) is a very simple markup language without >>> syntax and simple but sophisticated document styling, capable of >>> producing PDF and XML files. >>> >>> The key philosophy behind this markup language is to eliminate the >>> strange syntactic characters seen in most markup languages, but >>> at the same time try to maintain a high level of expressiveness, using >>> only document reconstruction. >>> >>> Check it out >>> http://hackage.haskell.org/package/fmark >>> https://github.com/jabolopes/fmark >>> >>> Best regards, >>> José >>> >>> -- >>> José António Branquinho de Oliveira Lopes >>> 58612 - MEIC-A >>> Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), Universidade Técnica de Lisboa (UTL) >>> [email protected] >>> >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> Haskell-Cafe mailing list >>> [email protected] >>> http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe > > > -- > José António Branquinho de Oliveira Lopes > Instituto Superior Técnico > Technical University of Lisbon > > > > _______________________________________________ > Haskell-Cafe mailing list > [email protected] > http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe -- Ivan Lazar Miljenovic [email protected] http://IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list [email protected] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
