[Gardeners] texinfo/documentation

[Tim Cross]

JC Helary writes:
 > > I have to say I'm not convinced that defining a new markup language is
 > > a good idea. My issue with this is that the markup language is only
 > > part of the equation. Possibly of more importance is a suitable
 > > authoring environment.
 > 
 > Sure, but typing docbook markup is not exactly the most exciting part  
 > of writing documentation.
 > There are pseudo html markup for "writers" that automatically produce  
 > html through Perl for ex.

This is my point. You can get docbook/xml editors which allow you to
write documentation just like using a word processor i.e. you don't
even need to know any docbook markup or you can get editors and add-on
modes that put all of that in menus and short-cut keys. Its unlikely
you will have any of this with a new non-standards based markup language.

 > 
 > I write a lot of html by hand and I know I'd love to have a simple  
 > way to write formatting/structure information. And I really don't  
 > care much about the output as long as the input is simple enough for  
 > my fingers.
 > 
 > Plus it's got to have a lisp like syntax otherwise it won't work  
 > nicely for people who are user to write a lot of lisp. Well, I don't  
 > really know about that but I figure that it would just be like typin/ 
 > applying functions to strings.
 > 

You can achieve that with existing markup - especially XML based
markup like docbook. Write your XML as s-expressions and then have a
processor which turns it into standard docbook XML. this would give
the best of both worls - those who want to use a high level editor can
and those who prefer to write at a lower level and doing the xml
manually could use the s-exp style which is then processed into xml.

Tim