On Friday, July 31, 2015 at 3:47:56 AM UTC-7, Dima Pasechnik wrote: > > XML? I wish pandoc (http://pandoc.org/) could handle conversions to and > from your format... > Do people really want to write XML by hand? I tried it once (GAP docs can > be prepared using XML) and was not amused. > > Just wondering, > Dima >
Dear Dima, As you know XML is a very uncomplicated syntax. Five special characters: <, >, &, ', ". And the quotes are rarely an issue (the ampersand is another story). Processing XML with a functional language (XSLT) has a steep learning curve, but that is not an author's concern. And I have yet to find a problem in text-processing with XSLT that I had to hack my way through. It is all very natural. The right tool for the job. As David notes, I am designing a collection of tags and attributes that will increase an author's productivity, cleanly separate content from presentation, and allow a variety of powerful output formats that do not require an author to know LaTeX tips and tricks, HTML, CSS, MathJax, Sage Cell server, etc. With a semi-reasonable editor that understands tag-completion and matching (I use Sublime Text; XML Copy Editor is free and more powerful) you can become quite proficient quickly. I used LaTeX for thirty years. In this project, I've seen even more clearly all the places it is lacking. The "XML? Yuck!" factor probably delayed me from starting this project by three years. So it was not a rash decision. I am scratching my own itch, and it is going quite nicely. I write for hours and make almost no syntax errors. And for anyone who wants to try - you can always create the (clean) LaTeX output and go back to using that, so your writing is not locked into this system. A conversion to Pandoc would be a nice feature. However, with some of these simpler markup languages, you discover they are not expressive enough to create something like a heavily cross-referenced textbook. Would you like to contribute a conversion to Pandoc? You'd have fun. In the end, I am trying to increase the supply of open textbooks (all subjects!) by providing an open source tool that is both powerful and reasonably easy to use. And with a soft place in my heart for Sage that has been a primary initial emphasis. Projects like Tom's convince me of the utility. It is an uphill slog, but I'm in it for the long haul. Thanks for your comments. Rob -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-edu" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-edu+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-edu@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-edu. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
