1 Introduction

APT (Almost Plain Text) is a simple markup language (like HTML) than can be used to write simple article-like documents (like HTML). Unlike HTML, APT uses as few tags as possible to express the structure of the document. Instead, APT uses paragraph indentation.

The benefits of using APT are:

• APT documents are not tedious to type using text editors.
• When writing an APT document using a text editor, what you type is readable (i.e. not obfuscated by markup).
• APT documents can be embedded in source code (C, C++, Tcl) comments (a la javadoc).
• APT documents can be converted to many formats (currently LaTeX, PS, PDF, HTML, SGML or XML/DocBook, RTF) using aptconvert (lightweight, 100% Java, OpenSource tool).
• APT is content oriented and strictly structured. That's why APT documents are perennial. For example, it is possible to convert them to DocBook with almost no loss of structure.

The drawbacks of using APT are:

• You are limited to simple (simplistic?) article-like documents.
• The style of the documents generated by aptconvert is simple and neutral. It cannot be parametrized to enforce an entreprise specific look.
• Using a text editor to author structured documents is clearly not the wave of the future (which our current project xmledit is :-).