Hello Hussein. Thank you very much indeed for your answer. We'll try to migrate from APT to something else.
Regards Daniel Hussein Shafie wrote: > Daniel Varela Santoalla wrote: > >>We're quite happy users of XXE here (we bought several licences) and >>also use the APT format for some documents. >> >>While with XXE and DocBook everything seems more or less ok, the users >>that write APT are always complaining of the same two things: >> >>- The fact that starting in the first column will make your paragraph a >>first level header. In some cases people just writes a single paragraph, >>and they expect it to behave (in absence of further formatting) closer >>to plain text. It would be nice if ONE STAR meant first level section, >>TWO second level and so on. >> >>- The fact that you have to put [] after a bulleted list to avoid all >>following content to become part of the last list item. I think this is >>a nice feature that allows to write complex "items", but in the light of >>its usage, there are many more cases where you actually want to END the >>item than where you want to extend it. So much more sensible default >>would be to end the item by default and use something else to extend it >>if you have to (indentation?). >> >>These two things are making the whole process unintuitive and come back >>again and again. Would it be possible to do something to fix it. Maybe >>being able to configure the behaviour or the parser would be a good >>thing, so that it doesn't break compatibility for everybody else... >> >>Please tell me your thoughts about it. > > > I would recommend to give up using APT (Almost Plain Text -- see > http://www.xmlmind.com/aptconvert.html) as soon as possible. > > This should not be a problem given the fact that you can automatically > convert APT to many other formats. (We did that here at Pixware/XMLmind > a few weeks ago.) > > The basic idea behind APT is that the author must use a plain text > editor to create a *nicely* indented text with as few visible markup as > possible. For APT, nicely indented means properly structured. > > After looking at the way my coworkers used to create APT documents here > at Pixware/XMLmind and after looking at the simple markup languages used > by most wikis, using indentation to express structure now appears to be > a *bad* *idea*. People are simply too lazy to properly indent a text by > hand. They tend to naturally create very ugly, unreadable, text flows. > > > > --- > PS: From what you are describing your users don't seem to use the APT > plug-in for XXE (in which case, XXE would have hidden all the details > about the APT format). This is fortunate, because starting from V3.1, > this plug-in is no longer available for download. -- Daniel Varela Santoalla European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) (http://www.ecmwf.int) Email: dvarela at ecmwf.int Telephone: (+44) 118 9499608
