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No, but it is horribly verbose and a pain to work with. I personally find the flow of writing to be constantly interrupted with the demand to mark everything u
by rleigh 8y ago
No, but it is horribly verbose and a pain to work with. I personally find the flow of writing to be constantly interrupted with the demand to mark everything up just so, and for very technical documents with a lot of markup, the markup can dwarf the content several times over!
While they are less powerful, markdown, restructured text and other simpler markup languages are much more productive to work with. They are easier for beginners to understand, and the markup is sufficiently lightweight for most of the common cases that it doesn't interrupt your train of thought while trying to think about how to best describe complex technical details.
- bkor 8y agoAn alternative to retext is Mallard. It's pretty easy to use, see http://projectmallard.org/ http://projectmallard.org/. It's used within GNOME for the documentation.
- rleigh 8y agoThanks, I took a quick look. However, it appears to be XML-based markup not too different from HTML or DocBook. So I don't see this having the benefits which lightweight markup provides. It has all of the same disadvantages of HTML and DocBook in terms of the markup verbosity from what I can tell. Which isn't to say it's not very good at what it does, just that I can't see a compelling difference over DocBook or HTML.
- int_19h 8y agoThe nice thing about DocBook is that, because of how strictly structured it is, there are visual editors for it that provide experience far superior to anything that can be had with Markdown etc, especially for large quantities of documentation. I would dare say that it's also easier for beginners that way, too.