On 30 Oct 2013, at 19:24, Yuriy Tymchuk <yuriy.tymchuk@me.com> wrote:
On 30 Oct 2013, at 18:22, Damien Cassou <damien.cassou@gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, Oct 30, 2013 at 5:53 PM, Yuriy Tymchuk <yuriy.tymchuk@me.com> wrote:
1) If we want something like markdown, why not to use Markdown?
markdown misses a lot of features we need to write a book as you highlight in your next point. So I don't understand your question :-)
If you want to write a comment and display it in Amber I donât see why people have to learn a new markup language when there is markdown.
2) When I think about the book I think about something nice. I donât think that markdown is good for books. Thatâs exactly what I encountered. I wanted to start with this updated version of RBE and wanted to use Gutenberg so it will be possible to put the book on iBook store and Amazon and read it on iDevices and Kindles. But When I started to rewrite latex source in Gutenberg Iâve found that a lot of details are going to be missing, because the is no support in Gutenberg for them.
because the code is simple, well tested and written in Smalltalk, we can add the features we need.
Thatâs my main question: why wonât we write books in ePub (because it the #1 eBooks format) and confer it to .mobi (for kindles) as the formats can be converted without a problem. Iâd also enjoy to write books in iBooks Author, but it will be hard to cooperate as not everybody is using Mac.
I don't know ePub but from what I can't see, it is not simpler than LaTeX. We want people to write books easily.
Iâm not looking for simplicity, Iâm looking for a good final product. ePub shouldnât be simpler, itâs just made for eBooks. On the other hand there are editors with WYSIWYG support like:http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-K2Q-tdVbPRI/UI08v7LhzHI/AAAAAAAAABY/vZ5LHjM6nb4/s1... And of course there is iBooks Author that I mentioned.
Iâm not trying to convince, Iâm just trying to understand why development of a new syntax is better the reusing/extending existing one. Or why we canât use epub + sigil for example.
I personally *love* Markdown, it is very easy/productive to write documentation in. But, - there are different, competing and conflicting Markdown variants - there is no official specification (OK, daring fireball, but he refuses to work with github, stack exchange) - there is no formal syntax specification, nowhere - it is very hard to write a parser, it is too loosely specified Pier syntax is not new, it is probably older than Markdown. As far as I am concerned, the most prolific/active authors get to decide, it is a simple as that. I am just hoping that their standalone parser and document model is high quality ;-)
Cheers. Uko
-- Damien Cassou http://damiencassou.seasidehosting.st
"Success is the ability to go from one failure to another without losing enthusiasm." Winston Churchill