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.
