$*$
may be hard at
first. In such situations, a properly configured Yodl macro set removes these
obstacles and thereby helps novices. Yodl is designed to be easy to learn.
As the Yodl package is growing, so is the manual. The ease of `learning Yodl'
may thus somewhat diminish, but just keep in mind: as long as you need just
plain texts, Yodl does OK. If you want more functionality, e.g., the
composition of manual pages for Unix, dig into the documentation.
Second, Yodl permits to create more than one macro set, defining the same
commands, but leading to different output actions. Thereby, the same input
file can be converted to several output formats, depending on the loaded macro
set. In this, Yodl is a `general front' document language, which converts a
Yodl document to a specialized language for further processing. This was of
course one of my reasons to write Yodl: I needed a good converter for either
LaTeX or HTML.
Third, Yodl always allows an `escape route' to the output format. Most
situations can be handled with Yodl macros, but sure enough, some users will
want special actions for a given output format. A typical example for the
necessity of such an escape route is the typesetting of mathematical formulas.
Say you want to use Yodl for a document that is converted either to LaTeX
(being a very good mathematical typesetter) or to HTML (a very poor
mathematical typesetter). An approach might be to decide inside the
document how to typeset a mathematical formula. Yodl provides conditional
command processing to accomplish this. The decision would be based on the
output format: for LaTeX, you'd typeset the formula using all the facilities
that LaTeX offers, and for HTML you'd use poor-mans typesetting. Typically,
other pre-processors for documents don't allow such escape routes. Well, Yodl
does.
Please send Yodl questions and comments to yodl@icce.rug.nl.
Please send comments on these web pages to
(address unknown),
send other FSF & GNU inquiries and questions to
Copyright (c) 1998 Karel Kubat and Jan Nieuwenhuizen
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