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