Re: gEDA-user: git based wiki

[Colin D Bennett <colin@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 24 Jan 2011 04:02:57 +0100
Kai-Martin Knaak <kmk@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Peter TB Brett wrote:
> 
> > Bonus points for syntax highlighting mode for Emacs.
> 
> http://alexott.blogspot.com/2008/09/emacs-dokuwiki.html ;-)
> 
> 
> > An example of IMHO *lovely* markup is reStructured Text.

I like reStructuredText, although it may not provide the cleanest syntax
when you want to do fancy things like math equations or trying heavily
control the output.  On the other hand, I find it extremely pleasant
to write general text in rST, and there are Latex->PDF, HTML, and
OpenDocument Text outputs available.


> Hmm. I see some issues:
> 
> * Lots of evaluation of space, indention and empty lines in the 
> syntax. Most markup languages avoid interpretation of white space
> for a reason.

Here's my explanation of why this is a feature, not a bug:
You can see the white space in the plain text, therefore it should have
some corresponding effect on the output.  White space for things like
setting off a preformatted block or a block-quoted paragraph keeps the
plain text clear and uncluttered.  Blank lines should cause a paragraph
break since they appear as a break in the plain text, etc.


> * The level of a section heading markup is determined implicitly
> by the order this particular style appears in text. This allows for
> interesting side effects. Remove a heading that happens to be a 
> first in the text and you may shift the levels of text way down 
> stream.

Yes, you have to standardize on your header styles within a document.


> * There is no way to mark a column, or a row of a table as header.

You can certainly have one or more header rows at the top of a table.
I don't think you can have a header column as such, however, but you
could make the first cell's text *bold* to achieve a similar effect.

http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/user/rst/quickref.html#tables


> * There is no caption to tables or images.

Not true; at least you can caption images (I don't know about tables).
See <http://grub.gibibit.com/Journal#october-2008>.


> * There is no way to mark up formulas.

I haven't done math in rST myself, but here are some things I've found:

* Thoughts from the Sage Math project regarding rST and math.
http://wiki.sagemath.org/SphinxSEP

* Sphinx has a plugin that allows both inline and display mode LaTeX
  math rendering.
http://code.google.com/p/sphinx/source/browse/trunk/doc/ext/math.rst
http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~creller/web/tricks/reST.html#math


Regards,
Colin


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