Re: Language Creation: The International Language Construction Bulletin (working title :)) )

On 2 May 02, at 9:55, Christophe Grandsire wrote:

> As for the format of the submissions, I can now accept the following formats,
> in decreasing order of desireability: LaTeX, RTF, Word, WP and HTML
What about POD (Perl's "Plain Old Documentation" format)? ;) (If you
have Perl, you almost certainly have pod2latex, but I don't know how
general that is -- I can imagine that it might be geared to manpage-
type documents.)

And as someone else suggested, plain text? If I got around to
submitting anything, I would probably use plain text.

*However*, I can also imagine that learning a minimal subset of LaTeX
wouldn't be that hard for me, and if it makes life easier for you, then
I can send you a small LaTeX snipped that you can plunk into a document
template.

I don't know whether it's possible to write LaTeX if you only know,
say, a half-a-dozen commands (new paragraph, bold, italic, accents,
that kind of thing) or whether you have to know a lot of intricate
typesetting details. But I can imagine that it's a simple matter of
"use '\par' when you want to begin a new paragraph, '\bold ...
\endbold' for bold text, and \'a for a-acute". And if that is possible,
and you wouldn't mind summarising a basic set of commands, then I could
try to submit bits of LaTeX.

I can imagine needing:

* paragraph breaks
* line breaks, for when you want to specify them explicitly
* accented letters: umlaut, acute, grave, circumflex, caron (inverted
circumflex)
* bold, italic, underline
* image (either a real LaTeX image insertion string or a dummy that you
will replace with the real thing -- for when you want to put an image
in the middle of your text)
* indenting a whole paragraph (for quotes or samples)

Tables, I can imagine, may be too difficult in LaTeX to describe easily
to someone who hasn't done it before. But maybe they're not?

Can anyone think of something I might have forgotten? Maybe bulleted
lists (with round discs, or dashes, or something), if that's easy?

Cheers,
Philip
--
Philip Newton <Philip.Newton@...>

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