## Problem space

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].

Where @White2022 examines benefits for authors with accessibility needs,
the interest here is benefits
for authors with unconventional needs for expression;
specifically the need to "collect ones own thoughts",
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?

## Idea

Extend the Quarto document publishing system to handle semantic annotations.

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.

This project will write an extension
to detect semantic annotations in the Markdown input,
transforming them as appropriate to the various output formats -
e.g. XMP metadata for PDF output and RDFa for html output.

Already a specification has been draftet
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.
