Subject: Yodl 1.31 released - Yet oneOther Document Language

article(Yodl -- Yet oneOther Document Language)
       (Jan Nieuwenhuizen email(janneke@gnu.org)
        Karel Kubat email(karel@icce.rug.nl)
        Frank B. Brokken email(frank@icce.rug.nl))
       (1998)

    quote(This message is in the Yodl document language.  What better way
    to demonstrate?  If you see a lot of parentheses, just read over them.
    This `source' format should be readable nevertheless.  The same text
    is included at the end formatted as plain ASCII.  If you want the full 
    documentation, visit http://www.cs.uu.nl/people/hanwen/yodl/)

nsect(What is Yodl?)
    Yodl is a high-level document language.  The package comes with a a
    set of converters to some major document languages, e.g. LaTeX(), Unix
    "man" and SGMS, HTML.  The idea of using converters is not really
    unique, but Yodl provides converters in one package, so that
    the various conversions should have a more consistent look.


nsect(What's new since 1.22?)
    itemize(
    it() it's now unmistakably released under the GNU GPL footnote(Yodl has 
         been GPL'd a long time ago, but previous versions still contained 
         leftovers of a questionable license.  All has been resolved and 
	 cleared up now.)
    it() it has a (new) maintainer.  As of June 6, 1998 (or thereabouts)
         Yodl is maintained by Jan Nieuwenhuizen email(janneke@gnu.org)
    it() texinfo converter
    it() latex2e converter (latex209 is deprecated)
    it() more managable configure/make/install/dist structure
    it() experimental support for embedding other languages; For example,
         Yodl supports integration with GNU LilyPond's mudela language
    it() .rpm and .deb binary package support
    it() lots of bugfixes
    )

nsect(Why Yodl?)
    The whole purpose of Yodl is to provide a simple-to-use and extensible 
    document language, that can be used to convert documents in the Yodl 
    format to a variety of other formats.  For this reason Yodl somewhat 
    resembles generalised markup languages, footnote(Standard 
    Generalized Markup Language) but:

nsect(How easy to use is it?)
    Yodl is quite easy to use.  Typing parentheses is less work than typing 
    <> or \{}.  And, Yodl doesn't insist on weird tags.  In that respect
    (starting and ending tags) Yodl is not a markup language.  Yodl handles 
    all its commands in a C-style manner, e.g. tt(em(...)) will set the
    text emphasized.  

nsect(What can it do?)
    Currently, the package supports conversions to LaTeX, HTML, SGML, "man" 
    format, "ms" format, semi-automatic conversion to Texinfo and 
    a poor-man's conversion to plain ASCII.  It should be fairly easy to 
    add other conversions.

nsect(Where to get it?)
    Sources are available from

	ftp://ftp.lilypond.org/pub/yodl  Europe (binary releases too)

    More detailed info can be found on the webpage

        http://www.cs.uu.nl/people/hanwen/yodl/

nsect(Who should I contact ?)
    For the benefit of Yodl-users the Yodl mailing list exists.
    Subscribe to the list by sending email to email(yodl-request@icce.rug.nl), 
    containing the lines
    verb(
    subscribe
    end
    )
    and submit your postings to yodl@icce.rug.nl thereafter.




