7 Jun
2024
7 Jun
'24
1:32 p.m.
Warner Losh <imp(a)bsdimp.com> wrote:
At the risk of venturing too far off into the weeds
(though maybe it's too
late for that)
What do people think of the newer markup languages like Markdown or ASCII
Doctor? They seem more approachable than SGML or docbook, and a bit easier
to understand, though with less control, than troff, LaTeX or TeX.
Having written books in troff, DocBook (SGML and XML), Texinfo and
AsciiDoc, I can say that the latter two are much more pleasant
that the former two.
AsciiDoc is quite nice once you get to used to it, but sometimes getting
it to layout things exactly the way you want can be difficult. Also,
there aren't good free software toolchains for it to produce really
nice output. The production process for the AsciiDoc book went
AsciiDoc --> HTML --> Proprietary Formatter (Antenna House) --> PDF.
I have not written much MarkDown, but I agree that it's too sparse
for serious (book length) work.
My two cents,
Arnold