Preparing wordprocessing-format dogfood
I'm preparing to do some dogfooding
of wordprocessing format on my blog.
Basically the next post or the post after
that will be translating from .wp to markdown.
I've modded Pandoc to read .wp files.
Pandoc can do translations between document formats.
WP is sort of a markup format. It sets apart from XML with minor differences.
- It comes with no escape characters. Some old control characters are used to control the markup.
- The format is "propositional". Elements are built by parenthesising text and then identified by adding attributes inside the group.
The format is text enough that it can be edited with a text editor, but the user doesn't need to worry about the control characters, because they're not otherwise used or intended as part of text when writing a plaintext document.
When WP is used with incremental parsing libraries, any plain-text editor can extend their graphical modes to form WYSIWYG-like editing on top of a plaintext document.