Co-developers wanted: document markup language

[Torsten Bronger]

Hallöchen!

Jeremy Sanders writes:

> Torsten Bronger wrote:
>
>> I don't know exactly what you mean but the answer is probably no.
>> For example, I want the author to state the title, keywords, etc
>> of his document, however, he should not state that he wants the
>> title printed centred and 4cm from the top of the page.
>> 
>> The latter is defined in the "theme" which will be given as a set
>> of ordinary LaTeX commands (for the LaTeX backend).
>
> Isn't the problem that making such a theme will be very hard?

Well, it will be a lot of work because there are so many elements
but there is no high complexity.  There will be a standard LaTeX
backend, and further backends can be built of top of that so that
for some of them, only very little extra code is necessary.

> One of the annoying things about LaTeX is lack of control over
> positioning (e.g. floats, page breaks...). The one thing most
> LaTeX users moan about is trying to get their document to fit into
> an n page limit (e.g. for a proposal).

Well, trying to meet a page limit is a more exotic requirement in my
opinion.  Anyway, apart from the theme and some parameters that you
can pass to it, there will be a LaTeX cfg file which, if present in
the document directory, will be inserted directly before
"\begin{document}".  This is a quick and simple way for LaTeX
wizards to configure the LaTeX process.  In this file, you can set a
smaller lineskip and a tighter font, for example.

> Maybe the theme could have some options to control spacing,
> however, like some sort of CSS.

At least *I* won't include a CSS parser, escpecially not for the
document source file.  My aim is to keep the list of parameters for
the backend a one-liner for most documents.  Themes may recognize
arbitrary many parameters but the standard themes will know only a
few (paper size, margins, font/fontsize, columns, one/twoside, and a
few more).

Of course, a third-party theme may use CSS for LaTeX, possibly the
very same CSS file which is used for the accompanying HTML backend.

> I think the one thing that would improve LaTeX is orthogonality in
> its commands (e.g. why no 8pt option for the document, why the
> crazy \small, \LARGE, etc commands?),

(There is the extsizes package.)  I understand "orthogonality" as
the independence of features, and by and large this is true for
LaTeX.  \small is not for *global* font changes after all.  You may
miss completeness, well, Gummi will surely offer even less, which I
think is one of its chances.  I certainly miss homogeneity in LaTeX
(for example, 10-12pt is in the standard classes, 8-20pt is in
extsizes), and in this respect, Gummi will offer much more.

> and fixing the font system to be based around modern
> fonts. Finally making bibtex part of the core and making it easy
> to use would be great.

This is another opportunity: You can hide the toolchain (well, this
is done by LaTeX editors, too) and implementation uglinesses from
the author.  By the way, Gummi will use the new biblatex package for
the bibliography.  It's really a relief to abandon the notorious
BibTeX style language for good.

Some people asked me whether it wouldn't be better to improve LaTeX
instead, however, this would make possible only a small fraction of
these goals.  BibTeX is a good example: Its syntax is utter crap,
and even with biblatex you have to learn how to use the outdated
7bit (sometimes 8bit) format of bib files.  The whole LaTeX system
is immutably optimised for English letters.  Aleph will ease this
somewhat sometime.  In Gummi, the only thing left of all this is
that "en" is the default document language.

Tschö,
Torsten.

-- 
Torsten Bronger, aquisgrana, europa vetus
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