Re: WIP: asciidoc replacement

From: David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>
Date: Oct 4, 2007, 20:58 UTC
Message-ID: <85tzp6oavq.fsf@lola.goethe.zz>
In-Reply-To: <46a038f90710032355t77c38d30p781743a6f248fab5@mail.gmail.com>

"Martin Langhoff" <martin.langhoff@gmail.com> writes:

> With AsciiDoc we've managed to avoid the arcane format, but we are
> still laden with a horrid toolchain.

Let's put this somewhat into perspective: the toolchain is horrid with regard to the complexity and documentation (well, AsciiDoc documentation itself is quite thorough and reasonably organized, but it does not buy you much without learning Docbook, and learning Docbook is such a chore that people would rather use AsciiDoc in order to avoid it), not horrid regarding the usability or flexibility of the results.

If we had a few people specializing in Docbook/AsciiDoc/XSLT available constantly on the team, we could probably get along fine.

> In that light, I actually like what Johannes is doing, even though
> it's a timesink.

The problem is not just that it is a timesink now, but that it will remain a timesink. There is a reason that we don't have so many formats around with multiple high-quality backends.

> Do the other text based alternatives these days have a workable high
> quality PDF/latex output format without pulling in brittle
> dependencies like XSLT?

Texinfo produces good info and plain text, tolerable PDF and HTML and not-quite-usable Docbook. The output for HTML from the current git documentation toolchain certainly looks better. I don't see how to generate PDF right now, but there must be a way (xmlto complains about not seeing passivetex though I have it installed in TeXlive).

The source is uglier than AsciiDoc, but then there is no cleverly disguised information in it: every formatting detail is quite out in the open. The same is true for Docbook, but Docbook really eats the cake, platter and all concerning unreadability of the input. On the other hand, there are more special-purpose editors that know how to deal with Docbook/XML than there are for Texinfo.

Texinfo gives a reasonable subset of Linus-thinkalikes the cooties, and that pretty much rules it out: we need a format that people are willing to write in.

There are not really many options for versatile formats, I am afraid.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum