Zim currently uses its own syntax, based on DokuWiki's. The author seems very interested in supporting a more standard syntax as an alternative, but (editorial aside 8-) is hampered in doing this within the app by a desire to keep WYSIWYG rather than a (modal?) edit/preview interface.
So to start with, he's apparently willing to consider writing an export/conversion routine out of Zim into one of Pandoc's input syntax formats and have users just use Pandoc from there to its many output targets. He may be reluctant to do learn enough Haskell to create a reader within Pandoc itself, but as long as he keeps up with extensions over time doing it from ?Python I think? should be equivalent, right? The author (Jaap cc'd above) has asked me<http://lists.launchpad.net/zim-wiki/msg01511.html>to recommend the specific syntax - here is my reply, comments welcome, and most importantly let me know if I've got anything wrong. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: <hans...@gmail.com> Date: Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 10:16 AM Subject: Re: [Zim-wiki] txt2tags support To: Jaap Karssenberg <jaap.karssenb...@gmail.com> Thanks so much for taking my supposedly-joking but-of-course-perfectly-serious-if-greedy requests in the right spirit. On Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 1:33 AM, Jaap Karssenberg < jaap.karssenb...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Mon, Jan 23, 2012 at 6:23 PM, <hans...@gmail.com> wrote: > > According to Wikipedia, but no where else I've found, Zim supports > exporting > > to txt2tags. > > > > Was/is this (still/ever) true? > > This was true for the 0.2x series of zim. After the re-write in python I > didn't implement this again, and till today nobody complained about it. So > my guess is that not many people - if anybody - was using it. > Yes, txt2tags isn't as actively developed as other tools in the light-markup-documentation space and perhaps has lost some traction as an outbound-only source tagging format. I really like pandocs closer-to-any-to-any approach, and the developers are incredibly responsive to even the most niche requests if they seem potentially useful to anyone at all. > Joking aside I had a look at the pandoc toolchain. Since it is haskell, it > is not something that is easy to adopt for zim. I wouldn't think there'd be any need to incorporate anything at the code level, as you say simply support the right syntax. > However not having tried it I have no idea what format is best to support > for this kind of conversion: txt2tags, markdown, rest, .. ? > Pandoc and txt2tags have no conversion path to each other, only common target output formats, and as I said pandoc is deeper in several areas and IMO any important output format advantages t2 has will be taken up by pandoc RSN. For example, I personally think AsciiDoc is important as a light-markup alternative to full-blown DocBook XML. T2 outputs to that, but currently pandoc only outputs directly to the latter. However, someone has recently started working on an extension to pandoc to support the former as well. To answer your question - the pandoc-extended flavor of markdown is its "native master source" syntax, and gets added to as various cross-platform features are extended - for example, currently being discussed in the list is the ability to apply span/divs for CSS purposes (of course this is html-only terminology, I forget the equivalent in LaTeX/PDF-speak) to inline "snippets" as well as block objects through something like this: - Here is some text and [this is the bit I want to receive a special style.]{.special_emphasis}. However, reST/Sphinx is another well-supported "master source" syntax in Pandoc, and although not all of its directives are currently converted, I'm pretty sure the gaps are either unimportant, temporary or due to lack of equivalents in the target outputs. The big advantage of reST is the very wide and deep support in the Python community, so working with that rather than pandoc's more "proprietary" flavor of markdown would give you a "two for one" benefit of attracting Pythonistas that may never have heard of pandoc, while still getting (I believe) 99% of the latter's functionality as well. I will point out this thread to the pandoc guys and see if they agree with the above.
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