Overview

Project Information

Bobcat is a document markup language and tools for it. It is very simple to use and yet is suitable for complex technical and scientific documents. Bobcat consists of a command-line tool for converting Bobcat documents to other formats such as PDF or HTML. Possibly there will be a GUI for it.	Category:	document processing
	Operating System:	Windows, Linux
	License:	MIT License
	Programming Language:	Python
	Project description:	DOAP

The goal is the development of an alternative to the LaTeX markup language. It should be very simple to use and yet be suitable for complex technical and scientific documents. The Bobcat converter will use LaTeX as one of its backends. If you are interested, contact Torsten Bronger via email or instant messaging.

What we already have:

an Bobcat project FAQ which gives further motiviation for this project
a mailinglist, also as a newsgroup on Gmane
an SVN repository; browse the source code online. Additionally, we have a Launchpad project page with Bazaar branches and bugtracker.
a collection of ideas and the first section of a specification
a Bobcat sample document
an example of a Bobcat parse tree
a proposal for formula syntax
a chatroom at bobcat@conference.jabber.origo.ethz.ch

The primary sources of inspiration are LaTeX, reStructuredText, MediaWiki, and AsciiDoc. For equations, LaTeX+AMSMath was the main source, but also from MathML, Linear Math Syntax, and OpenOffice.org some ideas were copied.

However, I'd be very happy to have some co-developers. I think it's an exciting, not-too-complicated, multi-faceted project but I don't have the time to do it alone. Decisions would be made based on general consensus on the mailing list, however, you should identify with the projects goals and guidelines so far. The prototype will be programmed in Python and published under the terms of the MIT license. (We can discuss the licence but not the programming language ;-))

The todo list:

Implement the parser as much as possible, and parallely to the parser, the LaTeX backend.
An HTML backend

In the long term, backends for XML, RTF, OpenDocument, plain text, and Docbook are desirable. Additionally, we need as many themes as possible, and user documentation.

For Windows, it would be great to have a complete distribution with a GUI and LaTeX & friends included. The GUI can be done in wxWidgets in 500–1000 lines of code, well, it needn't be highly sophisticated.

The provisional project logo was derived from a picture by Bernard Landgraf and is published under the terms of the GFDL.

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gummi-spec.pdf	212.66 KB