From: Suraj Kurapati Date: 2008-11-25T02:18:04+09:00 Subject: Re: erbook 5.0.0 Gregory Brown wrote: > On Sun, Nov 23, 2008 at 11:47 AM, Dean Wampler > wrote: >> Interesting. I've been using AsciiDoc for DocBook creation. It's good >> to have a family of alternatives. > > Though erbook sounds like a very cool project to watch, AsciiDoc just > made my life a lot easier. Thanks for mentioning this tool, it just > saved me a ton of time typesetting my book. Yes, AsciiDoc seems to provide a lot of nice time-saving shortcuts[1]. > Suraj, you may want to look into how AsciiDoc works, I've looked at AsciiDoc before, revisited[1] it again now, and realized that... > as the kind of smarts it offers for inferring the structure of ... this is exactly what I do not want to do. erbook focuses only on the explicit structure (as defined by method calls) of your document, and lets you organize your document using indentation (just like source code) as opposed to adding syntactical divisions between adjacent structural elements, which I find as the weak point in all plain-text-to-whatever formatting systems I've seen so far. Indentation also facilitates trivially simple code-folding in your text editor, which isn't possible for these formatting systems unless you set up regexps to define which lines define the begin/end and depth (the hardest part!) of structural elements. I leave the smarts to the plain-text-to-whatever formatting system the user wants to use to markup their content. So far I've provided Markdown[2] (which is quite smart and preserves readability) as the default content formatting system, but any other formatting system can be easily substituted[3] in its place. One can even use AsciiDoc as the content formatting system for erbook. :-) > your document combined with the power of ERB could be quite exciting. That's already possible: % cat your_file.erb | erb | asciidoc Thanks for your suggestion. [1]: http://powerman.name/doc/asciidoc [2]: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/ [3]: http://snk.tuxfamily.org/lib/erbook/#Text-to-XHTML-conversion -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.