On 11 Nov 2012, at 17:26, Stéphane Ducasse <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Nov 10, 2012, at 9:41 PM, Sven Van Caekenberghe wrote:
> 
>> On 10 Nov 2012, at 21:33, Stéphane Ducasse <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 
>>>> 3. Lets discuss how we want to describe the content "in-image" 
>>>> for "serving on the web". Maybe with a "Markup to HTML translator" 
>>>> - or a "WikiStyle to HTML" like help
>>> 
>>> I want to use the pier syntax because I know that I can generate the 
>>> correct latex 
>>> with it for the books, and of course any kind of html and other formats.
>> 
>> I vote for Markdown, it is more like a defacto standard.
> 
> I prefer pier since I can convert all the book macros (and I cannot do that 
> in markdown).
> I'm spending so much time writing that at least I want the result to look 
> more than a bad documentation.
> 
>> And you can convert Markdown into anything, there exit tons of tools for it.
>> 
>> Remember that I sent you my Zinc & Zodiac docs converted to Latex ? Were 
>> they no good ?
> 
> It depends at which level.
> Can you tag on word in markdown to have bold, italic, index?
> If I would not have written 350 pages of seaside book with pier it would be a 
> different story but 
> so far pier syntax is good for doing everything: html, latex, even markdown.

In Markdown, it is *italic* or _italic_ and **bold** and __bold__.

Now for index entries, I don't know exactly - making an automatic index is a 
special post process function anyway.
I think you could do something like [ReadStream][index-entry]s are objects that 
you can read bytes or characters from.

Making a book from several independent source files is quite a job that 
requires custom programming. It would be very cool if we could do all that in 
Smalltalk, using a good Markdown parser and a cool object representation.

I have nothing against Pier, but it is something that only exists in our niche 
world, not in the larger world out there. 

Sven

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