INSPext


  IN SHORT

INSPext stands for "INSPext is a Not-So-Plain tEXT grammar".  The g for
'grammar' is silent and somewhat hard to see with the naked eye.  The INSPext
project is yet another attempt at defining a grammar for an abstract text; text
that can easily be exported to other text formats.

  GETTING UNNECESSARILY WORDY

Text written in INSPext can be easily exported and imported to and from
plaintext, LaTeX, Microsoft Word, Apple iWork Pages and other popular formats
and tools.  The idea is that for some rare kinds of people (read: me) it is
hard to pick a text format or a typesetting tool and stick to it.  I thus
embarked on defining my own text language and typesetting philosophy in order
to rest myself assured that at any point in time I can easily change my writing
tool.

You may claim that I'm out of my mind.  Yes, that is correct.

INSPext is an abstraction, and as such it inherently means loss of information.
It means that when you move to and from other tools the transfer will not be
smooth unless your text is extremely trivial.  That is, INSPext compilers will
drop elements of your text when compiling your text into other languages or
file formats.  This is because the INSPext language is so friggin simple and
stupid that it doesn't know all the tricks that other tools know and don't have
in common.

Indeed, on the flip side this also means that with little effort you will
quickly learn the entire INSPext language and will be able to spit out INSPext
documents intuitively off the top of your head without the need for a reference
manual.  Or so I hope.

Yes, you may very well wonder what is the point if you can't use styles in your
documents, embed images, create hyper-links, define paragraph indents and so
forth.  INSPext is not just a language, but also a philosophy.

  INSPext's PHILOSOPHY

The INSPext philosophy really expands and formalizes on that of plaintext (or
so I like telling myself).  The idea is that text should be simple, very
simple.  Pictures are complex beasts, brochurs are complex beasts, women are
complex beasts -- but text is a simple beast.  So our text boils down to
letters, words, sentences, paragraphs, sections (or chapters).  Let's also
allow for a title, but that's it for now.

Perhaps it would be overly religious to disallow tables, but others may say it
is also fundamental to allow for mathematical expressions, tables of contents,
bibliography and other common elements.  So lets go back to our goal:
simple, intuitive, reference-free grammar for writing text.  We'll stick to
that for now.  In time, I trust, we will come to appreciate that.

  AIGHT SO LETS GET DOWN TO BUSINESS

I'll give you a feeling for an INSPext document through an example.  This
README file you are reading is written in INSPext.  You may notice there is
little special about its layout or format, apart from the fact it is plaintext.

Section titles are written in ALL-CAPS and are indented.  Specifically, they
are indented by two spaces.  The title of the document is also indented by a
single space, but isn't really in all-caps; That's fine, all-caps or not, this
is optional and merely syntactic sugar.  Truth be told it doesn't matter if you
choose to indent section titles by two or three spaces.  Their semantic as
section titles comes when they are indented more than the title of the
document.

Paragraphs have a single empty line (in other words, two newlines) separating
them.

That's it, that's all there is to know, I think.  Go ahead and have fun
INSPexting!