formatting French ebooks

You might think that formatting French ebooks in Curl as web markup would be easy – and it is – but there are still challenges.

If you use the TocDocument as the default document-style there are markup hierarchy issues under each {heading level=n, } macro.

I usually start with simply a default vanilla {paragraph } macro and then move to user defined formats and procedures.

The challenge is to make this accessible to the non-programmer working in a non-Western language.

At this time I am evaluating two rebol language variants (r3 and red) and one Icon variant (Object Icon) for parsing my Curl markup in accordance NOT with Curl syntax but USER preferences.

If all else fails, I will fall back to Logtalk with some Prolog dialect.

In the case of my current French ebook, the rules are to cover non-breaking spaces. The rule of thumb in France is to surround "two-part" punctuation with spaces. The challenge is to address resizeable text frames or panes in which re-flowed text must remain readable.

The minor rules apply to ALL Curl ebooks where the text is in Curl markup (and until we have a webkit wrapper library, that is what I use) such as converting all ASCII single quotes, quotes, psuedo-hypens, brackets and installing matching left- and right- quotation devices.

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SCSK Curl and Beta Etiquette

SCSK's Curl team disabled my local PC applets.

How? By expiring the runtime engine for their Andoid development CAEDE beta IDE.

So I reinstall the old 8.0 runtime Surge® engine.

Nope. No applet will run under that 8.0.0 browser plugin until the NON-browser 8.0.1 IDE is uninstalled ( a separate selectable/optional step in the uninstaller itself !! )

My Smalltalk vendor did something like this back in the big merger that killed Smalltalk (it was years before I was willing to buy another professional Smalltalk IDE license.)

Now Instantiations owns the VA code and Pharo may get onto Android devices.  And there is the Mobl language - and Red may replace Rebol.

In its day, Borland could be outrageous as could IBM and Microsoft and Oracle.  But we are now in the post-Java manager-gotta-buzzword era -  are we not?  Don't managers now talk about "open-source methodology" as if that meant something? JavaScript is no longer a bad ECMA joke?

But here I am - hung out to dry again by a language vendor.

Challenge: name one web app framework that generates non-HTML markup such as Curl without significant revisions which break updates. No, it is not yet Seaside 3.0.x - that future must wait a little longer.

Remember when XHTML was declared by committee to be the future of web  markup?  Ahem.  How long can it take me to start calling HTML5 simply 'HTML' ?  By 2014?

At least I never fell for Google Gears ... just DBX, Nuon, OS/2 SOM/DSOM, Rebol 3 ...