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 reports 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:
  • If you put text before the preamble, i.e., before stating the document type, chances are that Yodl will happily translate the file, but that the following stages will fail. E.g., the <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.
  • If you put modifiers, such as 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..

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    Copyright (c) 1997, 1998, 1999 Karel Kubat and Jan Nieuwenhuizen.

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    This page was built from Yodl-1.31.18 by

    Gwenole Beauchesne <(address unknown)>, Thu Aug 16 14:01:31 2001 CEST.