Very simple markup language for writing fiction
I'm using a plain text editor (Vim) to write a fiction piece (chapter book), and I'm wondering what markup languages others use for such a task? I'm looking for something exceedingly simple, it does not have to be powerful at all. Minimum requirements would be supporting basic styling like bold, italics, and underline; markup to indicate titled chapters, and scene splits within chapters; markup for footnotes/endnotes; and markup must be nestable.
But most importantly, the markup should not get in the way of my writing. In other words, I don't want to spend 25% of my keystrokes writing markup, and it should be easily readable even with the markup exposed. For instance, I find REStructured Text to be ugly and difficult to read smoothly.
My end goal is to "publish" to ePub and possibly latex. I'm currently using a very simple markup of my own devising, and a parser for it that generates both of those formats. However, it's a somewhat ugly markup (it uses curly braces which don't read smoothly) and my parser is rather clumsy, unable to handle things like paragraph breaks inside quotes.
So I can either improve on my own markup and rewrite my parser, or I can use something that already exists if anybody has any suggestions.
Update:
I should have guessed that this would be the end result: I've spent the past week or so redefining my own markup and rewriting a parser for it and a number of output converters for it. Thanks for all the good answers; I think you've pointed out the best markup languages that are available, but I'm finding that there just aren't any available that are well suited for writing novels, at least not for what I have in mind.
If anyone is interested or potentially interested in using this, let me know; I will most likely be putting this on bitbucket in the next few weeks as a set of python scripts and scons tools.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/7016. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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Just because markup preferences are personal, I will mention the markup system I developed for writing my last non-fiction book. It is called SAM (Semantic Authoring Markdown). It is a general purpose language, like XML, but with lightweight syntax, like Markdown. This means that while it has standard markup for the common stuff like paragraphs, bold, italic, lists, etc, you can also make up your own tags. You can also validate it using an XML schema.
It uses indents for structure (like Python) so if you like indents you may like it, but if you don't like indents you probably won't like SAM.
It outputs to XML or HTML (with semantic tagging) and you can process the XML output to produce whatever final format you want.
The project is available on GitHub here: https://github.com/mbakeranalecta/sam
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Why do you need to mark it up at all whilst you're writing it? To save time later? This is false economy. You should focus all your efforts on your writing, proof reading, editing etc. Then when you've finished doing all of that, export your data/writing into a program to mark it up.
Mark up should happen right at the end, not whilst you're writing.
Focus on one thing at a time.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/7024. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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