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