Re: [Haskell-cafe] [ANNOUNCE] Fmark markup language

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 wrote:

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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? ;-)

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Cheers, José

On 18-09-2012 06:05, Ivan Lazar Miljenovic wrote:

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On 18 September 2012 13:57, José Lopes wrote:

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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).

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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:

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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 wrote:

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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) jose.lopes@ist.utl.pt

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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