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.