On Mon, 24 Feb 2003, MikkelFJ wrote:

> I have on and off for a long time been hacking on a simple xml format - like
> some of the people behind yaml - then comes yaml. But meanwhile I changed
> focus towards a format that is supposed to be especially suited for
> documentation purposes. yaml is also text typing friendly - but still not
> the best possible for text entry. I hacked something in Ruby but need to
> back to it. The primary motivation is that Tex is too complex and xml-doc is
> too cumbersome - and finally the need to have a text format as you can't
> trust wordprocessors to be around in the long term, and are bad for
> formattting and source control.

If TeX and LaTeX are too complex, have you looked at Lout?
http://snark.ptc.spbu.ru/~uwe/lout/lout.html
I've not had time to get into it, but it seems to have relatively
few rules. People always want to do more thigs, so more cases crop
up, which I can see from the elided examples you have run into
already.  One thing that irked me about troff, which I otherwise
like, is that I can never remember which commands just affect
following text, and which need arguments on the same line. Also,
having tables and equations outside of troff itself meant that
dealing with them was a pain when you tried after 6 months of not
using them.  I don't hear much about troff nowadays.

One suggestion: get rid of '\' notation.  Too many programs use it.
Yes, it is nice to have a consistent standard, but when you pipe a
text string though a couple of these then you end up with \\\\\
which are really bad for the eyes! :-)  {brace} {closebrace} could
allow insertion of your special characters.

        Hugh