On 19/09/2012, at 12:04 AM, José Lopes wrote: > Hello Richard, > > When you say "(for) some people (...) you special syntax is not natural" > that's a good thing. I want these people involved in the project. I want > to understand what they find natural in order to weigh the options and > make a proper decision.
One important question is how many *scripts* you want to support. Do you, for example, want to support Greek? There is a Unicode character for Greek question mark U+037E, some documentation I've seen says that the preferred character is U+003F. So does ";" terminate a sentence or not? How many *languages* do you want to support? Are you going to support Armenian, where the question mark that ends a sentence goes not _after the last letter_ of the last word but _over the last vowel_? (As someone who only writes in English, I have no trouble with the answer "only the Latin script, only the English language".) I don't actually believe that there _is_ a natural convention for italics, boldface, superscripts, etc. Even _this_ is an artificial convention going back to mechanical typewriters that could underline but not change font. > > On the README file in the github page you will find a brief explanation > of the markup elements. I need to elaborate you that though because > I feel I explain it too fast. > https://github.com/jabolopes/fmark I did read the README.md. I disagree that there exists any problem of manual removal of special characters. If I want to remove XML markup, I just do unxml foobar.xml >foobar.txt. If I want to convert from one kind of markup to another, there is pandoc, which is admittedly a touch buggy, ... The problem is that the README.md does not in fact explain what any of the 'markup elements' are. Let's take one little example, a letter of the kind I used to write by hand. 123 Copper Road, Gemstone, Dunedin, New Zealand 9999. 31 February 2016. Dear Schnorer, I am writing to you because I am tired of frobulating. Yours without wax, Dr Strabismus of Utrecht (whom God preserve!) How do I tell Fmark about this structure? How do I get this layout? (The '1' and 'Y' should be in the centre.) > Let me answer your questions about sections. The amount of indentation > is not fixed. You can use whatever you want. There is also no nesting limit > in Fmark, however, there is a nesting limit in the Latex backend. For now, > quotations, block quotes, source code embedding, etc, are not implemented. > Those will be added in the future. These answers belong in the README.me. > > About embedding a Fmark document in another document. That seems to > be a very cool feature. I will definitely think about it! Maybe you can come > up with a "natural" way of doing it? The last time I thought I had a natural way to do anything like that I found that the SGML design was worse broken than I would have believed possible. _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list [email protected] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
