From b4545e4fa7a2d241f1d9ebbfe8a7de403e379c14 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Jonas Smedegaard <dr@jones.dk>
Date: Wed, 26 Mar 2025 07:16:11 +0100
Subject: reduce intro; move/add chunks to background and design; update
 references

---
 _background.qmd | 67 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 1 file changed, 67 insertions(+)

(limited to '_background.qmd')

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)
-- 
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