james said:
I would be especially interested in Bowerbird's opinion on this.
i expect you will make some edits in the next few days, so i'll get to it sometime next week, when it has settled down. ***
I like RST better than the ZML that he had originally suggested.
it's all light-markup. that's the main decision-point involved.
My reason is that while ZML documents look like they aren't marked up at all, that is not necessarily an advantage.
that can be debated. but i'm not really interested in doing so.
For instance, to make a heading in ZML it sounds like you have to insert some number of blank lines before the text.
correct. 4 blank lines before. and 2 blank lines after. 1 blank line between heading and subheading, if any. this will sound very familiar to anyone who knows the p.g. standard text format, as it is exactly the same...
Counting blank lines is something I'd rather not deal with.
i can understand that. except i don't find myself doing much "counting". the computer's pretty good at doing that, so i just let the computer do the counting for me... then it displays the table of contents, and i just check to make sure it looks right -- that all of the headers at a specific level (there's often just one) line up nice and straight and purty, just like they're supposed to. and if one of them is wrong, it sticks out like a sore thumb, so i see it, and know it's wrong, and i go and fix it, pronto... one of my test-suite books has headers that are 6 levels deep, and i routinely handle that file without having any problems...
RST lets you underline the heading with something and not worry about blank lines before or after.
you could easily create a macro that would toggle between the blank-lines headers and a more-explicit type of markup.
...switch to implicit... change '\n[h1] ' to '\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n ' change '\n[h2] ' to '\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n ' change '\n[h3] ' to '\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n ' change '\n[h4] ' to '\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n ' change '\n[h5] ' to '\n\n\n\n\n\n\n ' change '\n[h6] ' to '\n\n\n\n\n '
...switch to explicit... change '\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n ' to '\n[1] ' change '\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n ' to '\n[2] ' change '\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n ' to '\n[3] ' change '\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n ' to '\n[4] ' change '\n\n\n\n\n\n\n ' to '\n[5] ' change '\n\n\n\n\n ' to '\n[6] '
*** my authoring-tools show formatted output _while_ you edit, so there's no need to "guess" how something is gonna look... -bowerbird