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Comment by vpj | Hacker News Reader

I was working on something similar but with a markdown like syntax instead of latex. Project is still in initial stages though.

http://vpj.github.io/docscript/

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Looks interesting. A few questions/comments: - In what language did you wrote the backend? In particular how do you create the bars/tables? - Wouldn't it be better to just call it something like "Forestpin Flavored Markdown"? From what I get you basically add some extra syntax (like itallics) and extensions (sidenotes) - Regarding the sidenotes, it may be hard to get the syntax. What if you detach it from the location where its mentioned like you do for footnotes?

Anyways, looks pretty cool!

Thanks!. It's written in Coffeescript. I didn't think much about the name when we started this. Didn't want to call it markdown because we didn't want to make it compatible with standard markdown, especially because of indentations. Will probably change the name in the future.

Does that mean docscript is no longer in development? I was kinda hoping it might develop into a low featured, easy to use replacement for latex.

I find that except for math I use a minimal amount of features of latex, but a lot of work and weird code to display simple things.

I just don't get why there isn't something that does a few things well and nothing else.

It is in development. Started working on it last week. Still experimental. Thinking of changing the syntax a bit to be a little more intuitive. It's on github:

https://github.com/vpj/docscript

Will add a command line compiler and stuff soon. We are using it to generate documents at our startup. So it will be in active development for sometime.

Maybe take a look at pandoc (markdown -> latex or html with equations/tables).

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