zim-wiki team mailing list archive

[hansbkk@xxxxxxxxx]

Sorry somehow I missed including the list

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: <hansbkk@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 10:16 AM
Subject: Re: [Zim-wiki] txt2tags support
To: Jaap Karssenberg <jaap.karssenberg@xxxxxxxxx>


Thanks so much for taking my supposedly-joking
but-of-course-perfectly-serious-if-greedy requests in the right spirit.

On Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 1:33 AM, Jaap Karssenberg <
jaap.karssenberg@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 23, 2012 at 6:23 PM,  <hansbkk@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > According to Wikipedia, but no where else I've found, Zim supports
> exporting
> > to txt2tags.
> >
> > Was/is this (still/ever) true?
>
> This was true for the 0.2x series of zim. After the re-write in python I
> didn't implement this again, and till today nobody complained about it. So
> my guess is that not many people - if anybody - was using it.
>

Yes, txt2tags isn't as actively developed as other tools in the
light-markup-documentation space and perhaps has lost some traction as an
outbound-only source tagging format. I really like pandocs
closer-to-any-to-any approach, and the developers are incredibly responsive
to even the most niche requests if they seem potentially useful to anyone
at all.


> Joking aside I had a look at the pandoc toolchain. Since it is haskell, it
> is not something that is easy to adopt for zim.


I wouldn't think there'd be any need to incorporate anything at the code
level, as you say simply support the right syntax.


> However not having tried it I have no idea what format is best to support
> for this kind of conversion: txt2tags, markdown, rest, .. ?
>

Pandoc and txt2tags have no conversion path to each other, only common
target output formats, and as I said pandoc is deeper in several areas and
IMO any important output format advantages t2 has will be taken up by
pandoc RSN. For example, I personally think AsciiDoc is important as a
light-markup alternative to full-blown DocBook XML. T2 outputs to that, but
currently pandoc only outputs directly to the latter, but someone has just
started working on an extension to pandoc to support the former as well.

To answer your question - the pandoc-extended flavor of markdown is its
"native master source" syntax, and gets added to as various cross-platform
features are extended - for example, currently being discussed in the list
is the ability to apply span/divs for CSS purposes (of course this is
html-only terminology, I forget the equivalent in LaTeX/PDF-speak) to
inline "snippets" as well as block objects through something like this:

  - Here is some text and [this is the bit I want to receive a special
style.]{.special_emphasis}.

However, reST/Sphinx is another well-supported "master source" syntax in
Pandoc, and although not all of its directives are currently converted, I'm
pretty sure the gaps are either unimportant, temporary or due to lack of
equivalents in the target outputs.

The big advantage of reST is the very wide and deep support in the Python
community, so working with that rather than pandoc's more "proprietary"
flavor of markdown would give you a "two for one" benefit of attracting
Pythonistas that may never have heard of pandoc, while still getting (I
believe) 99% of the latter's functionality as well.

I will point out this thread to the pandoc guys and see if they agree with
the above.


 > In either case, I'd suggest correcting the errors/omissions in
> appropriate
> > locations for greater clarity and consistency.
>
> Feel free to go ahead and edit it. Wikipedia is volunteer driven, I
> never submitted a description of zim myself there.
>
> Done.