Historias de Cronopios

In order to write articles, books or just about any kind of documentation, DocBook and LaTeX are the obvious formats to use. Unfortunately, both are complex and difficult to learn, and the source files produced are pretty verbose and hard to read. Therefore, a number of systems offering plaintext wiki-like markup syntax have appeared. The documents written in these formats can be translated to DocBook (XML and/or SGML), LaTeX, XHTML, Unix man pages, etc.

I’m about to choose a structured text markup authoring tool from which to convert to, at least, DocBook (LaTeX also being desirable). AsciiDoc (written in Python) looks quite nice, but there are some other interesting tools such as:

• deplate, written in Ruby
• stx2any, a set of shell scripts based on sed and m4
• ResT (reStructuredText), written in Python
• parsewiki, written in Perl and included in Debian
• aptconvert (Almost Plain Text) which is implemented in Java

Have you tested any of them? How do they compare? Which one do you recommend?

This entry was posted on Lunes, Abril 25th, 2005 at 10:42 and is filed under Software libre. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.