On Sat, 11 Nov 2017 12:15:44 +0000 jack da <picama...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Steve Litt: these days I write all my personal documents with > Leafpad, which adds word-wrap capability to what can be achieved with > plain text editors ex, nano, etc. If you include Vim in that list, Vim has at least one Zencoding plugin. With Zencoding, you can set up a start/end tag pair, with the cursor resting where you're supposed to type, with one keystroke. > > I discovered that I cannot access the raw MarkDown text of the > original Alternative Init .. document [copy+paste from the > talk.devuan.org web site strips the markup directives]. Just as well > I will write the new paper from scratch. Markdown, Asciidoc, and Asciidoctor are wonderful *for what they do*. They're not a documentation be all and end all. > > I was once fluent in HTML, and XHTML seems to just to be a strict > version thereof. Yes. And as far as fluency, when you use Bluefish, it makes suggestions for what tags to put and what to put in the tags, making Xhtml open to the less than fluent. > We use LaTEX in technical documents, LaTeX is wonderful *for what it does*, which is make beautifully typeset documents whose linefeeds are determined at compile time, not at read time (like ePub, HTML or Xhtml). The problem is that you can't reasonably convert LaTeX to XML, HTML, Xhtml or the like. LaTeX is the best around if you know the page size, line width, and margins at compile time. > and I can > quickly become fluent in any sensible markup language [including > MarkDown]. Yes. Markdown and Asciidoc are dead bang simple. > > The question to ask is: are the documentation tools widely > available; are they open source; can they be built without many > dependent packages/libraries? Let me answer your questions, in the context of the Bluefish editor, which I think is superior for HTML, Xhtml, and probably several other languages: * Widely available? : Yes. Most distros have a Bluefish package, and you can compile the code straight from the Bluefish authors. I had to do this when the Void Linux version of Bluefish went bad. * Open Source? : Yes. GNU General Public License, version 3, or at your option, later. * Few dependent packaes/libraries? : No. Bluefish has lots of dependencies. It's a GUI program useful in many human languages, capable of understanding many computer languages. Its realtime semi-authoring of code makes it both a huge timesaver and a program with serious dependencies. The following is a list of its direct dependencies: =========================================== [slitt@mydesk ~]$ xbps-query -x bluefish hicolor-icon-theme>=0 desktop-file-utils>=0 xmlcatmgr>=0 python>=0 glibc>=2.8_1 gtk+3>=3.0.0_1 pango>=1.24.0_1 cairo>=1.8.6_1 gdk-pixbuf>=2.22.0_1 glib>=2.18.0_1 libxml2>=2.7.0_1 enchant>=1.4.2_1 gucharmap>=3.0.0_1 [slitt@mydesk ~]$ ============================================ Unless you've managed to live without GTk all these years, none of these direct dependencies look particularly harmful to me. As far as I can tell, no KDE libs, no Gnome libs, no systemd. My advice would be to try Bluefish for a couple weeks, then decide whether to keep it or throw it away and uninstall all auto-installed packages no longer necessary. SteveT Steve Litt October 2017 featured book: Rapid Learning for the 21st Century http://www.troubleshooters.com/rl21 _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng