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. 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:

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:

...

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

_______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe

-- José António Branquinho de Oliveira Lopes Instituto Superior Técnico Technical University of Lisbon

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

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

...

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).

...

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:

...

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:

...

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

_______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe

-- José António Branquinho de Oliveira Lopes Instituto Superior Técnico Technical University of Lisbon

_______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe

-- José António Branquinho de Oliveira Lopes Instituto Superior Técnico Technical University of Lisbon

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:

...

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? ;-)

...

Cheers, José

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

...

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

...

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).

...

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:

...

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:

...

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

_______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe

-- José António Branquinho de Oliveira Lopes Instituto Superior Técnico Technical University of Lisbon

_______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe

-- 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

Hey Tillmann, That is a good point. What would you suggest for emphasis ? Cheers, José On 18-09-2012 21:00, Tillmann Rendel wrote:

Hi,

José Lopes wrote in an earlier email:

...

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.

And then:

...

[...] we can leave " for quoting and use the ' for something else.

That sounds like 'some special syntax' to me. Or should it be "some special syntax"? I can't remember which was for quoting and which was for something else. Maybe I need to look that up in the Fmark documentation, again.

Tillmann

-- José António Branquinho de Oliveira Lopes Instituto Superior Técnico Technical University of Lisbon

Hey, Why do you say that _italics_ and *italics* are semantically different? What do you mean? Cheers, José On 18-09-2012 15:30, Brandon Allbery wrote:

On Tue, Sep 18, 2012 at 1:05 AM, Ivan Lazar Miljenovic mailto:ivan.miljenovic@gmail.com> wrote:

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).

The odd thing is, I've found that I use those constructs "naturally" (i.e. when simply writing text in a text-only medium) in pretty much exactly the way Markdown uses them. _italics_ and *italics* are semantically different (I tend to use the former for titles and such) but are both usually italics in my normal usage. (There's also /italics/ but that is not very widespread.) I do tend to use # instead of = for headings but that's kinda stolen (and mutated) from a different variety of non-natural markup.

I suspect that when the dust has settled, it'll turn out that Markdown is pretty much right. Maybe with some tweaking, but largely it represents (and IIRC was derived from) actual in-the-wild textual usage.

-- brandon s allbery allbery.b@gmail.com mailto:allbery.b@gmail.com wandering unix systems administrator (available) (412) 475-9364 vm/sms

-- José António Branquinho de Oliveira Lopes Instituto Superior Técnico Technical University of Lisbon

On 18/09/2012, at 3:57 PM, José Lopes wrote:

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.

The problem with that is that some people DO end some headings with a full stop; for them your special syntax is not natural.

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.

You haven't found it. What you *have* is very special syntax expressed using several methods, AND IT IS NOT DOCUMENTED. I have read the examples, and I can find nothing explaining what the syntax is. For example, I find indenting subsections rather unnatural and error-prone. (For example, moving a paragraph from a deep location to a shallow one would create a new subsection unintentionally.) Is the amount of indentation fixed? How many levels of subsections are supported? What if I want to use indentation to express quotation instead? How do I embed source code? How can you get an example of Fmark in an Fmark document without having it acted on? I could go on and on with questions about syntax.

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.

Hello Stefan, Thank you for the input. Cheers, José On 18-09-2012 14:43, Stefan Monnier wrote:

...

The problem with that is that some people DO end some headings with a full stop; for them your special syntax is not natural. Markdown/ReST is already using the "no syntax" idea (e.g. compared to pre-wiki markup such a LaTeX or Texinfo), so he's simply trying to push this idea further.

I suspect it'll be difficult.

...

What if I want to use indentation to express quotation instead? I think this one is solvable: a paragraph that's more indented than the previous heading can be considered a quote.

Stefan

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Hey Richard, Regarding the languages, I think it is better to start with English and see how successful Fmark is. There's no point in trying to tackle lots of languages if we cannot solve the problem for one of them. But then again, keeping everything Unicode. In fact, in this matter, I think with Haskell we have an advantage because things like 'isSpace' and 'isPuncuation' work with Unicode. I now understand that the README.md is rather incomplete. I will add some more information about the markup. Although, things like bold, italics and so on are not implemented yet. I will also take a look at your letter example. I think the real challenge here is center alignment. I will think about a way to solve it in Fmark so we can discuss it later on. Thank you for the feedback. Cheers, José On 19-09-2012 00:37, Richard O'Keefe wrote:

On 19/09/2012, at 1:43 AM, Stefan Monnier wrote:

...

...

The problem with that is that some people DO end some headings with a full stop; for them your special syntax is not natural. Markdown/ReST is already using the "no syntax" idea (e.g. compared to pre-wiki markup such a LaTeX or Texinfo), so he's simply trying to push this idea further. Markdown is very heavy on syntax, what it is *light* on is specification of what the syntax actually is. As a result, I'm aware of three different dialects, and someone told me about having to reverse engineer the syntax from a Perl implementation. As a further result, I cannot write a program to reliably *generate* Markdown. I suspect it'll be difficult. Oh, more power to him for trying. I just don't think it can be pushed very far.

Oh, there is a really *filthy* hack that could be pulled for italics, bold face, and so on. Contrary to its original principles, Unicode includes several copies of ASCII (see http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1D400.pdf): Mathematical bold, Mathematical italic, Mathematical bold italic, Mathematical script, Mathematical bold script, Mathematical fraktur, Mathematical double struck (blackboard-bold), Mathematical bold fraktur, Mathematical sans-serif, Mathematical sans-serif bold, Mathematical sans-serif italic, Mathematical sans-serif bold italic, Mathematical monospace, and some similar sets of Greek. So as long as you don't want strike-through or underlying, and as long as you don't want italic Cyrillic &c, ... Too bad if you want a bold italic capital Thorn...

...

...

What if I want to use indentation to express quotation instead? I think this one is solvable: a paragraph that's more indented than the previous heading can be considered a quote. Ah, but the quotation might not end with a sentence terminator, so that would be considered a new heading.

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On 12-09-18 07:37 PM, Richard O'Keefe wrote:

On 19/09/2012, at 1:43 AM, Stefan Monnier wrote:

...

...

The problem with that is that some people DO end some headings with a full stop; for them your special syntax is not natural.

Markdown/ReST is already using the "no syntax" idea (e.g. compared to pre-wiki markup such a LaTeX or Texinfo), so he's simply trying to push this idea further.

Markdown is very heavy on syntax, what it is *light* on is specification of what the syntax actually is. As a result, I'm aware of three different dialects, and someone told me about having to reverse engineer the syntax from a Perl implementation. As a further result, I cannot write a program to reliably *generate* Markdown.

Very true. Sadly, this is the case with almost all other Wiki-like markup schemes out there. They are all implementation-specified. The only exception I'm aware of is Creole, for which an EBNF grammar exists, even if it's pretty nasty-looking. A look at that specification makes one appreciate how badly specified "natural" syntax is. In my opinion, there is no single natural syntax that can be imposed on ASCII strings and serve majority of uses. There are many different syntaxes that feel natural for different uses and different users, and the best we can hope to achieve would be a way to provide a formal and readable specification for each of those syntaxes. I've been playing with one approach in this direction with the concrete-relaxng-parser package, but it's still early days.

...

I suspect it'll be difficult.

Oh, more power to him for trying. I just don't think it can be pushed very far.

Oh, there is a really *filthy* hack that could be pulled for italics, bold face, and so on. Contrary to its original principles, Unicode includes several copies of ASCII (see http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1D400.pdf): Mathematical bold, Mathematical italic, Mathematical bold italic, Mathematical script, Mathematical bold script, Mathematical fraktur, Mathematical double struck (blackboard-bold), Mathematical bold fraktur, Mathematical sans-serif, Mathematical sans-serif bold, Mathematical sans-serif italic, Mathematical sans-serif bold italic, Mathematical monospace, and some similar sets of Greek.

Thank you for sharing this hack. It's very amusing. -- Mario Blazevic mblazevic@stilo.com Stilo International This message, including any attachments, is for the sole use of the intended recipient(s) and may contain confidential and privileged information. Any unauthorized review, use, disclosure, copying, or distribution is strictly prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient(s) please contact the sender by reply email and destroy all copies of the original message and any attachments.