Co-developers wanted: document markup language

[Aahz]

In article <87tzqp77my.fsf at wilson.homeunix.com>,
Torsten Bronger  <bronger at physik.rwth-aachen.de> wrote:
>Aahz writes:
>>
>> My point is that docutils already exists; given the combined
>> competition from LaTeX and docutils and OpenOffice, you should
>> probably explain what differentiates your project and why people
>> should support your project instead of (or in addition to) others.
>
>reStructuredText, AsciiDoc, and some others focus on source code
>documentation, or on software documentation.  In contrast to that,
>our markup should be suitable for PhD theses, papers and the like.
>Thus, it has weaker means for code snippets, RFC citation etc, but
>rich syntax for bibliographic entries, index entries, math, and
>floating figures.  

Enh.  reST is intended to be a general-purpose system.  It's certainly
extensible, and I've added code for index entries myself.  There has
been some recent activity on improving bibliographic support, and I
believe some people are working on integrating MathML.

>Additionally, input methods simplify using characters like δ, ⇒, or
>”.

"Everyone" says to just use a Unicode editor.  Long-term, I think that's
what's going to happen -- you're starting your project too late for this
to make much sense.

>The differences to LaTeX are explained comprehensively on the
>webpage, and actually LaTeX is the real competitor rather than
>reStructuredText.  OOo isn't a plain text format, and has no strong
>semantic markup.

Then you're really caught between a rock and a hard place.  LaTeX is
extremely well-entrenched; at the same time reST is gaining features.
You would probably make much better progress on your goals by simply
working on the reST project -- I doubt you can improve on reST as a
markup language, and the more you try to cram in, the more you're going
to look like LaTeX, anyway.

OTOH, this is Open Source, and nobody's going to stop you.  ;-)  I just
think you're also not going to get much traction.
-- 
Aahz (aahz at pythoncraft.com)           <*>         http://www.pythoncraft.com/

"If you don't know what your program is supposed to do, you'd better not
start writing it."  --Dijkstra