Hi,
Like I said it's a tradeoff. I will try to use this philosophy as much as
possible. But it's also important not to be fundamentalist. We'll see
as it goes.
I like that strikethrough. You are right about the quotes, but we can
leave " for quoting and use the ' for something else.
Cheers,
José
On 18-09-2012 13:18, Ivan Lazar Miljenovic wrote:
On 18 September 2012 21:53, José Lopes <[email protected]> wrote:
Hello Ivan,
I agree with your point: if you want a heading that ends with a punctuation
sign then you cannot do it in Fmark (for now). That gives me something to
think about. However, I will still look for a way that avoids (as much as
possible) special syntax. Do you have any suggestion?
I also agree with you on the "natural" conventions. I want to find a good
tradeoff between syntax and expressiveness. In other words, I want to
avoid as much those "odd choices" you mentioned. For example, I have
been thinking seriously about emphasis and what would be a good way
to do it. So far I could only come up with quotes (either " or '). What do
you think?
I think that _emphasis_ is pretty "natural", as is *bold* and possibly
-strikethrough-.
But you _are_ adding in some aspects of markup now.
Using quotes is bad because what happens if you're actually quoting someone? ;-)
Cheers,
José
On 18-09-2012 06:05, Ivan Lazar Miljenovic wrote:
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]
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--
José António Branquinho de Oliveira Lopes
Instituto Superior Técnico
Technical University of Lisbon
_______________________________________________
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--
José António Branquinho de Oliveira Lopes
Instituto Superior Técnico
Technical University of Lisbon
--
José António Branquinho de Oliveira Lopes
Instituto Superior Técnico
Technical University of Lisbon
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