This section describes the general format of a Yodl document.
First of all, a document in the Yodl language needs a preamble. This part
of the document must be at the top, and must define the modifiers and the
document type The modifiers, when present, must appear first.
The modifiers may be, e.g., latexoptions
, mailto
, affiliation
,
etc.. A very useful modifier is abstract
. All modifiers are listed in
section ??. In general, you should use as many modifiers as
appropriate; e.g., you should define a mailto
even when you're not
planning to convert your document to HTML. The reason is twofold: first, you
might later decide that a HTML version isn't a bad idea after all. Second,
later versions of the converters might use mailto
even for non-HTML output
formats.
Following the modifiers, you need to define the document type. This type is
either article
, report
, book
, plainhtml
or manpage
.
Except for the manpage
document type, which is described in section
??, the following rules apply:
You should decide on the document type by counting the top-level sectioning
commands that you need. E.g., if you write an article
with 20 sections, it
might be a good idea to switch to a report
and group some of the sections
into chapters. Similarly, a report with 30 chapters might be better off as a
book
with parts. As a rule of thumb, a document should have no more than
10 top-level sectionings, and each top-level sectioning should have no more
than 10 subsectionings, etc..
The document type also affects the way Yodl formats the output. An article
(or plainhtml
) leads to one output file; which means under HTML one final
document. If your article is way too long, then the loading of the HTML
document will be long too. In HTML output, Yodl splits report
s and
books
into files that hold the separate chapters. These can then be
reached via the table of contents. Ergo, the document length can also be
relevant when you contemplate switching to a report
or book
.
If your document uses special macros, then these must be defined before
they are used. I myself usually define such macros following the preamble.
E.g., see the file doc/yodl.yo
that is distributed with the Yodl package.
This is the main file of this manual and follows the syntax described herein.
To answer yes-but-what-if oriented minds, here are two results of the
wrong order of text, preamble and modifiers:
<html>
tag would come
too late in a HTML conversion, causing the HTML viewer to become confused.
Or, the \documentstyle
definition would be seen too late by the LaTeX
typesetter.
latexoptions
, after the
document type, then the modifiers will have no effect; though Yodl won't
complain either. The reason for this is the definition of such modifiers
will be seen following the stage where they are needed..
Please send Yodl questions and comments to yodl@icce.rug.nl.
Please send comments on these web pages to (address unknown)
Copyright (c) 1997, 1998, 1999 Karel Kubat and Jan Nieuwenhuizen.
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.