On 10/12/11 05:17, Dag Wieers wrote:
Hi,
It's clear that ODF support will not be part of AsciiDoc. Which, if you had told
me from the start, would probably have not motivated me to write the ODF
backend, but I am at a point of no return now... Well played ;-)
There was no intention to mislead, my desire to keep new filters (and by
extension backends) out of the AsciiDoc distribution was no secret, but maybe I
should have been more explicit:
http://groups.google.com/group/asciidoc/browse_thread/thread/40c64cd33ee1905c/578e9469fbaf5
The primary motivation for the plugin architecture was to enable filters and
backends to be implemented as plugins. The idea is to decouple the AsciiDoc core
from backends and filters.
The HTML and DocBook backends (and successors) will stay in the core
distribution but I envisage that all new backends will be implemented as
plugins. From a maintenance standpoint it's the only sane way forward.
The ODF backend is a great use-case for the plugin architecture -- if we can get
it working as a plugin then almost any XML/SGML backend should be possible.
But I am concerned that an output backend may never become really popular (or
even known) if it is not mentioned in the User Guide as prominently as the other
output backends (eg. in the list of attributes each backend supports etc...).
And I wouldn't be the author if I wasn't convinced about the potential the ODF
backend brings to AsciiDoc.
So is there something we can do to promote backends more/better in a future
release ?
You've got a point, section 4 of the manual needs to draw the readers attention
to the plugins webpage (http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/plugins.html) and any
other locations in the manual and website that discuss backends.
Personally I'd like to push the slidy and wordpress plugins along with all
filters (with the exception of the source filter) out of the core, but that
would probably raise a backward incompatibility hue and cry.
I'm not sure that popularity is all it's cracked up to be, one of the nice
things about AsciiDoc is that it flies under the radar -- users are generally
motivated discerning types that know what they're looking for, consequently the
mailing list is relatively low noise.
Also, I plan to release the ODF backend (as-is) when the next AsciiDoc version
is ready. Even if not everything works exactly as I want, I hope a wider
availability might bring more people to this project to help adding more themes
or finish the backend.
With your permission I'll cite the ODF backend prominently in the next release
announcement. All that's holding back the next AsciiDoc release are: any ODF
show-stoppers; finalizing and implementing the comment/annotation syntax; the
documentation changes discussed above; and I need to read the 'Sections with
multiple columns' thread.
Cheers, Stuart
It should be clear however that format style (names), attributes and constructs
may still change when we improve the functionality. (eg. the book doctype
currently hardcodes a lot of how the cover looks, which we might influence
through attributes instead)
Thanks for your help throughout !
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