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authorJonas Smedegaard <dr@jones.dk>2025-03-17 22:53:16 +0100
committerJonas Smedegaard <dr@jones.dk>2025-03-17 22:53:16 +0100
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## Problem space
+A text document often has multiple viewing modes --
+one mode for authoring and another for the final product.
+The author gets to see the wet ink when writing with a pen,
+or editing widgets in word processing systems,
+or markup codes in plaintext editors.
+The target audience typically gets a view of only the authored content,
+unless the document is (intentionally or not) opened in an authoring tool.
+
+ then source and target media might differ,
+e.g. a text authored in a word processor
+but delivered as a PDF file.
+
Two major modes for authoring texts:
WYSIWYG and plaintext.
A fundamental benefit of plaintext approach
is freedom of choice regarding authoring tools
[@White2022, p. 3].
+Among plaintext authoring modes,
+some are oriented towards technical accuracy
+while others prioritise simplicity and ease of use.
+Some authors requiring technical accuracy in their writing,
+notably in academic settings,
+use LaTeX as authoring format,
+while others use LaTeX only as an intermediate format
+with Markdown as their authoring format.
+
Where @White2022 examines benefits for authors with accessibility needs,
the interest here is benefits
for authors with unconventional needs for expression;
@@ -14,29 +35,60 @@ separately from or prior to targeting another audience.
## Problem
-How to extend Unix-style tools to support personal authoring
-for collecting multi-facetted thoughts -
-e.g. educatational exploration for making sense of a new academic field?
+This project is framed as the following problem statement:
+
+**How can Unix-style tools for authoring linear texts be extended
+to help structure non-linear thinking?**
## Idea
-Extend the Quarto document publishing system to handle semantic annotations.
+Implement plugins for the Pandoc document converter
+to enable authoring of ontological annotations in the text content,
+inspired by the conceptual idea in @Francart2020,
+and publish the plugins
+for easy use with the Quarto document publishing system.
-Quarto takes as input plaintext files written in Markdown,
-processes it through pandoc and a set of extensions and templates,
-to produce a website, a PDF document, a presentation slide show and more.
+Pandoc reads a text document,
+parses its structural components into an internal data structure
+called Abstract Syntax Tree (AST),
+and serialises and writes back into a text document.
+The AST is deliberately prioritises structural information
+and is relaxed about visual information,
+to preserve literal content
+while reducing format-specific stylistic details,
+relevant especially when processing between different formats.
+Most common is to read plaintext Markdown files
+and write LaTeX code further compiled into a PDF file.
+Pandoc allows supplying custom reader and writer functions
+as well as plugging into and manipulating the AST,
+which this project will exploit:
This project will write an extension
-to detect semantic annotations in the Markdown input,
-[@FrancartSemanticMarkdown2020]
-transforming them as appropriate to the various output formats -
-e.g. XMP metadata for PDF output and RDFa for html output.
-[@WikipediaXMPPage]
-[@rdfaInfoPage]
+to adjust the AST
+when abusing the default Markdown reader
+to read Markdown with added markup for ontological annotations,
+as proposed in @Francart2020
+and further sketched as a draft markup format in @Smedegaard2022.
+The implemented Pandoc extensions will be designed
+both for use standalone and as part of the document authoring framework Quarto,
+which uses Pandoc as central tool with a large set of extensions and templates.
+
+First milestone is reached
+when the filter can simply suppress the added markup.
+A further milestone is to embed the expressed annotations
+in supported output formats,
+e.g. as XMP metadata in PDF output
+[@PDFAssociation2020 chapter 14.3]
+and as RDFa in html output
+[@Herman2015].
+Another further milestone is to make use of the added markup,
+e.g. to annotate purpose of scholarly citations
+as presented in @Daquino2023.
-Already a specification has been drafted
-[@SementicMarkdownSpec]
-for how to annotate semantics embedded in Markdown.
-The challenge is to implement that specification -
-and possibly spot and refine the spec,
-and explore use cases for Markdown+semantics.
+As mentioned above,
+a draft specification has already been drafted
+in @Smedegaard2022
+for the syntax of embedding ontological annotations in Markdown.
+The main challenge of this project is to implement that specification
+as extensions for the existing Pandoc tool and Quarto framework,
+and as part of that potentially also refine the draft specification.