From: "Victor \"Zverok\" Shepelev" <vshepelev@...>
Date: 2007-04-12T05:52:02+09:00
Subject: Re: [ANN] ClothRed (HTML to Textile)

From: Phillip Gawlowski [mailto:cmdjackryan@googlemail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, April 11, 2007 10:26 PM
>Victor "Zverok" Shepelev wrote:
>
>> A bit OT, but I'm dreaming/planning (for a long time) about library,
>which
>> can handle "greatest common divisor" of all simple text format and
>perform
>> uniformly conversions like
>>
>> Textile   <=>     <=> HTML
>> Markdown  <=>     <=> PDF
>> Mediawiki <=> gcd <=> PS
>> RDOC      <=>     <=> OpenOffice
>>
>> There are several projects performing only [some markup]=>html
>conversions.
>> There is also Maruku[1], which seems to handle virually any
>Markdown=>[rich
>> format] conversion (and seems to embody some common intermediate format).
>> There is now your project.
>>
>> Isn't now a time to do something more generic?
>
>Well, once there are libraries to do any one of these tasks, you can
>build a tool chain, similar to DBI, for example.
>
>I know that there's a PDF generator written in Ruby, but i don't know
>about the other file formats. Creating markup parsers isn't that much of
>a challenge, so that could be done quite easily.
>
>I'd be happy to, once ClothRed is feature-complete in the HTML ->
>Textile area, to write an API to integrate ClothRed into other tools.
>

My point was, to have some intermediate format, and have couple of parsers
TO this format and generators FROM it. 

Now, authors of all libraries are solving 2 problems - parse & generate. It
should be nice to have one common HTML parser, which could be used either
for HTML->Textile, or for HTML->Markdown (only generators will differ).

From some poin of view, we can use Textile as intermediate, your library
would be "parser", RedCloth would be "generator". But this leaves Markdown,
Rdoc "off the game", while we have no Markdown->Textile and similar
convertors.

V.