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diff --git a/_background.qmd b/_background.qmd index 883a528..d7b4b91 100644 --- a/_background.qmd +++ b/_background.qmd @@ -9,6 +9,42 @@ serialised as RDFa (embedded in HTML) and PDF (embedded in PDF). ## Markdown +Markdown is "probably the most popular markup language today" +[@Rapp2023, p. 42]. +It was originally defined by @Gruber2004 +as a superset of HTML, +improving readability and ease of writing +by adding email-style markup +for common content structure like headers, emphasis, lists and hyperlinks. + +A core principle of Markdown is readability: + +> A Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, +> as plain text, +> without looking like it’s been marked up +> with tags or formatting instructions.. +> [@Gruber2004, section "Philosophy"]. + +Many dialects of Markdown have evolved, +some tightening the language for parsing efficiency and disambiguation, +some extending to cover additional structures +and some including support for a YAML or TOML metadata header section. + +Markdown as originally designed is a source format to produce HTML. +If using only Markdown-defined markup, avoiding HTML tags, +the text is however reliably translatable also to other formats. +Pandoc is a tool that can convert texts in Markdown dialects +into many document formats including HTML and (via LaTeX) PDF, +applying visual style and positioning throught templates. +Such document workflows, +including minimal structural markup as part of the creative writing, +applying visual layout as an automated templating process +tied to a target document format, +has been further streamlined for academic texts +in the Quarto document publishing system. + +---- + Markdown is a text markup language with an emphasis on being easy for humans to read [@Gruber2004]. @@ -58,6 +94,27 @@ others offer optional support e.g. through plugins ## Quarto +Pandoc is a document converter built around the markdown markup language, +able to parse from and serialise to many Markdown dialects +as well as equivalent subsets of other text markup languages +including HTML, LaTeX (and by extension PDF), +Office Open XML (as used by recent releases of Microsoft Word) +and OpenDocument (as used by OpenOffice and LibreOffice). +Pandoc is extensible, +supporting custom code loaded at runtime +either for custom parsing or serialising, +or for manipulating the intermediate internal content structure +called Abstract Syntax Tree (AST). + +Pandoc supports redefining input and output formats +and manipulating the internal document structure +as part of the automated parts of the framework. + +Pandoc is extendable. +Source and output format can be changed or completely redefined +and the internal document structure manipulated, +in the automated parts of the framework. + Collection of interrelated POSIX scripts and Pandoc extensions for enabling semantic annotations in Markdown-based authoring workflows. @@ -75,6 +132,16 @@ for enabling semantic annotations in Markdown-based authoring workflows. * structure semantic metadata as RDF triples * append RDF triples serialized as RDFa +Markdown provides intuitive and unobtrusive markup syntax +for structure like headers, emphasis, lists and hyperlinks. +Pandoc extends Markdown with syntax +for citation annotation +and an optional YAML metadata header. +Quarto extends Markdown further with syntax +for some styling and some convenience macros, +and applies templates for a uniform visual styling +across target document formats. + ### Interfaces * Pandoc document object model (DOM) |