After I put elitaire into CVS, and hence gave it a wider publicity, one of the first question was: “What are the rules of the game XY?” Most people know the rules of klondike, but some other games like Baker’s Dozen are unbeknown. So I had the plan to write a little help viewer for it for more than year.
And last weekend I’ve started to write one. First I was unsure what syntax I should use for the file format. For the writers html would be the easiest one, because almost every one has at least a little knowledge about html. So why didn’t I choose html?
- The help viewer is using ewl_text, so it suffers under the same limitations like Evas_Textblock does. Things like embedding images, tables and nice enumerations are not possible. I could only support a subset of html. Hence the author lost the advantage of knowing html, because he has to learn what he can use of the html syntax and what not.
- Html is tough to parse. If you have to deal with missing end brackets or misconstructions like this <em><a href=”…”> bla </em></a>.
- I don’t like html
Of course I could simply open the help page within a browser, but they are IMHO still too slow. I don’t want to wait some seconds untill I can see the help page.
How does the format look like? I have chosen a syntax that is inspired by tex, but much easier too parse. It has actually only one construction.
{\tag[parameter] text}
The parameter is optional, that means in most cases it looks like this:
{\tag text}
But also the text is optional, if you want for example a new line what is in html <br>, you have simply a new paragraph with no indentation.
{\noip}
The tags are very similar to the one of html:
{\h[x] text} is a header where x is a number between 1 and 6, default is 1. X determines the size of the header.
{\p text} is a paragraph with text.
{\a[url] } is a link
{\em text} italic text
{\st text} bold text
{\pre text} is a preformated text, it will not remove whitespace and the output is in monospace font
I still need to do some cleanups in the code and I haven’t integrated it in the elitaire code. But parsing and showing the text works already, even links . And I need to write the documentation 
. Hopefully, I find a native-speaking volunteer, who helps me to eliminate my spelling and grammar mistakes.
