On Tue, Nov 03, 2015 at 07:20:30AM -0500, Steve Litt wrote:
> On Mon, 2 Nov 2015 23:08:07 -0800
> Isaac Dunham <ibid.ag@???> wrote:
>
>
> > > > LibreOffice has too many dependencies, as well as AbiWord, while
> > > > I'd like to remain minimalistic.
> > > >
> > > > What do you use daily and would advise?
> >
> > I don't do that daily anymore, but I used to write/do basic formatting
> > in Ted, then the fancy stuff in one of OO/LO Write, MS Word, or
> > TextMaker.
> >
> > Sometimes I used VDE or MS Word for DOS 5.5 from FreeDOS or dosemu for
> > preliminary writing; of the two, I'd only recommend vde.
>
> I made some big strides on Stylz last night. I'm thinking I can have a
> not-too-featureful Stylz to Xhtml converter within a couple weeks. From
> there it's a matter of creating an Xhtml to ePub converter and an Xhtml
> to PDF converter.

I once improvised a file format and text converter. I had been using an
alphasmart keyboard offline, uploading it to my Linux machine, and using
really minimal markup. I then converted it to .html or .fodt on the
Linux machine. But all I had was straight text. This was before the
widespread availability of asciidoc and markdown. And although it grew
and grew over theyears, it definitely never came close the the variety
of text structuring that is avaiable to modern systems.

What I did learn in that project was that it is absolutely essential for
the document file format to be compatible with popular revision control
systems.

This meant that pretty well all the word-processors on the market were
ruled out. It was not acceptable to use compression. It was not
acceptable to flow words from one line to another in the actual file
format. (what you do in the editor display is another matter, but the
file format had to provide stable locations for newlines). It was not
aceptable to have each paragraph be its own line. (too coarse grained,
led to many unneccessary merge conflicts). It the editor was WYSIWYG
style (like libreoffice and MSword and abiword) the file format could
not have large bracketed syntax (which .odt and its relatives have)
because a merge might very well cause unmatched brackets, and the word
procesor would be unable to deal with it. No manual correction
possible, certainly not for an ordinary user.

I finally realised the original SGML was better for these purposes than
any of its modern XML desendants -- It did not require any open/close
tag matching, and had a kind of implicit operator priorities indicating
that paragraph breaks would occur within chapters and not the other way
around. You could use its tags more like separators than as enclosers.
Even if somewhat scrambled by a mismerge, it would still make sense, and
the user could use its WYSIWYG editor to repair the damage.

I had no problems with this in my own system, which had acquired
matching-bracket problems (because I hadn't realised the problems in
time) because I edited in emacs, and took care of everything myself.
And emacs did not change line bounradies in the file format. Tht was
the jb of the document copiler.

But I'm on another project now,, and the revised version of my own
system (using operator-priority style separators instead of braketing)
was not ready, I ended up using markdown. There's a remarkably
efficient markdown processor that's written in OCaml (a modern
statically-typed compiled language with good and efficient
abstraction capabilities).

> Maybe in a few months we can stop using bloatware like Sigil, LyX,
> LibreOffice and MSWord, stop using settleware like Markdown and
> MultiMarkdown and all the Wiki languages, and write our long documents
> in styles-based, easy to type, plain text, with Stylz. That's what I'm
> aiming for.

So let me hope that Stylz satisfies my requirements.

-- hendrik