GNU bug report logs - #1397
RFC: A "markup mode"

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Package: emacs; Severity: wishlist; Reported by: tomas <at> tuxteam.de; Keywords: patch; dated Thu, 20 Nov 2008 21:30:04 UTC; Maintainer for emacs is bug-gnu-emacs <at> gnu.org.

Added tag(s) patch. Request was from Glenn Morris <rgm <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. Full text available.

Information forwarded to bug-submit-list <at> lists.donarmstrong.com, Emacs Bugs <bug-gnu-emacs <at> gnu.org>:
bug#1397; Package emacs. Full text available.

Message received at (unknown):

From: tomas <at> tuxteam.de
To: quiet <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: RFC: A "markup mode"
Date: Sun, 13 Jul 2008 23:04:49 +0200
Lines: 74
Precedence: list
Errors-To: emacs-devel-bounces+rgm=gnu.org <at> gnu.org
Message-ID: <gkk5ay8509.fsf <at> fencepost.gnu.org>
User-Agent: Gnus (www.gnus.org), GNU Emacs (www.gnu.org/software/emacs/)
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Sender: Glenn Morris <rgm <at> gnu.org>

Severity: wishlist

[ resent from
  http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2008-07/msg00389.html ]=20

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Hi,

for some time now I have been working on a generic markup mode for
Emacs. The work has been sped up by the needs of a customer, which might
be served by this code.

I've asked the customer and they would be fine with publishing wnatever
comes out of it under the GPL -- even better if it is adopted as part of
Emacs.

Please find the current incarnation here:

  git http://tuxteam.de/~tomas/Repositories/am

Some remarks:

Design:

The idea is to support (nested) mark-ups like XML or Wiki, rendering
them in a more-or-less WYSIWYG fashion (as far as Emacs supports that).
The mapping between the markup elements and rendering whithin Emacs is
done via a "style" file (which is at the moment just an elisp file
containing faces and assorted fix-ups for special cases. Several
examples of style files are contained in the above code sample.

The markup model is more or less what we know from XML: spans of text
are attached with a "markup class" and a (possibly empty) list of
attributes. Those spans may be empty (the "singletons" in XML).

Implementation:

To satisfy the constraints:

 - preserve document order (even for empty spans)
 - move around markup classes on copy/kill and yank
 - round trip invariance (i.e. what is written is in some sense
   "equivalent" to what has been read)

I ended up with an interesting mixture of overlays, text properties and
invisible "sentinel characters" (always at the beginning of spans: thus
a span is "never empty" in the implementation (helps keeping document
order).

The current implementation features an XML parser (ugh! I must be crazy
to write _yet_ another half-complete XML parser, right?), and is able to
display this XML according to the "style file", copy/yank "works",
nesting whatever markup is picked up at the copy site within the markup
present in the target site.

It is implemented as a minor mode (I'd hoped once to use it as "literate
programming sub-mode" within a programming major mode, to embellish
embedded documentation).

I'd love to hear criticism, ideas, whatever. Do you think something like
this could be useful?

NOTE: I'll be off the net for the next fourteen days. But I'm looking
forward to your comments.

Thanks
- -- tom=E1s
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Report stored:
bug#1397; Package emacs. Full text available.

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Last modified: Tue, 20 Sep 2011 19:45:02 UTC

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GNU bug report logs - #1397 RFC: A "markup mode"

Message received at (unknown):

GNU bug report logs - #1397
RFC: A "markup mode"