[HN Gopher] PreTeXt: Write Once Read Anywhere Authoring and Publ...
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PreTeXt: Write Once Read Anywhere Authoring and Publishing System
Author : teleforce
Score : 29 points
Date : 2023-08-23 02:04 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (pretextbook.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (pretextbook.org)
| jxy wrote:
| Their code README says
|
| > PreTeXt is guided by the following principles:
|
| > 1. PreTeXt is a markup language that captures the structure of
| textbooks and research papers.
|
| > 2. PreTeXt is human-readable and human-writable.
|
| When did XML become human readable and writable?
| zetalyrae wrote:
| XML is a great choice for this because it's a _markup_
| language: it 's designed for adding structure and formatting
| information to documents in a way that's generic and
| extensible.
|
| Something like Markdown is too spartan for all the kinds of
| things you need to make a technical document.
| MilStdJunkie wrote:
| Yeah, Markdown's not really a print document format. But LMLs
| (lightweight markup) don't begin and end with Markdown.
|
| Asciidoc, on the other hand . . I've written aircrew flight
| checklists, component maintenance manuals, typescript
| developer documentation, illustrated parts catalogues,
| maintenance handbooks, operation guides, and a good-old-
| fashioned novelette in Asciidoc. Last few years with VSC.
| It's fast as hell. I got Asciidoc include for re-use, I got
| Asciidoc conditionals, VSC snippets, I got a billion other
| toys like textql, diagrams, wireviz.
|
| And yeah yeah yeah, I know, it's cheating: Asciidoc is
| DocBook, DocBook is XML. Except Asciidoc's not XML. Asciidoc
| renders in Chrome/Firefox/Edge extensions, Ruby, JS, Python,
| and it exports to DocBook, LaTeX, PDF, HTML5, ePub, MOBI, MSO
| via DocToolChain or Pckr and, well, hell, bring in Pandoc if
| you want something else. When it comes to the Asciidoc tools,
| I can go from bare metal to full-up publishing environment in
| ten minutes. And how do I render DocBook again?
|
| Oh, the XML pipelines. Those pipelines.
|
| Schemas breaking XML spec[1], "XML-aware" diff/merge,
| whitespace[2], sneaky goddamn proprietary entities[3],
| namespaces, 1NF, computability[4], charset, semantic-less,
| hierarchy fetishism, etc etc etc blabbity blabbity blah.
|
| I just realized this post sounds really frickin' angry, and I
| want to take a line here to say that I love all ya'll, but
| XML publishing has left some scars, and I'm sorry about that.
|
| [1] "Leading whitespace in attributes? CHARMING"
|
| [2] No such thing as "officially normalized" when it comes to
| XML whitespace, which means no lines, no tabs, no spaces.
|
| [3] Goddamn REVBARS
|
| [4] Ah, infinite arbitrary nesting, what a perfect fit for
| natural language
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| +1 asciidoc is where it's at. Given its strengths and
| similarity to markdown, I wonder why it hasn't taken off to
| the same extent.
| mdaniel wrote:
| the most famous example I know of:
| https://docs.atlas.oreilly.com/writing_in_asciidoc.html
| mdaniel wrote:
| Also, in case it matters to anyone: IJ plugin!
| https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/7391-asciidoc (Apache
| 2: https://github.com/asciidoctor/asciidoctor-intellij-
| plugin/b... )
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| XML may be a good choice to markup the structure and
| formatting of a technical document.
|
| That doesn't make it a good human readable and writable
| format.
| macintux wrote:
| Notice that the description didn't say it was a _good_
| format in that regard.
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| Aha, very true! It is human readable and writeable after
| all, just not very pleasant.
| joshmarinacci wrote:
| The ideal interface would be a WYSIWYM (what you see is
| what you _mean_ ) word processor like app that let you edit
| the markup visually, but using a semantic representation
| rather than strict WYSIWYG. Thus you can write without
| having to know too much of the syntax, but still be
| producing strict markup. I recall such editors existing
| about 20 years ago. I guess the market for XML tool died.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| You just described Obsidian. Its UX atop .md files is
| simply amazing.
| xbar wrote:
| Nice. It far exceeds my write-only publishing system
| juliangmp wrote:
| Now this did intrigue me quite a lot until the very second I
| looked at the example's "source code" and saw it's all XML.
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(page generated 2023-08-23 23:00 UTC)