luser-dr00g / ibis.ps

a document formatting engine inspired by scribe

ibis.ps

a document formatting engine inspired by scribe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribe_(markup_language)

The program implements a markup language and then presents a manual in that markup.

Project resumed from broken draft posted to usenet in 2011 https://groups.google.com/d/topic/comp.lang.postscript/qgyPTydQE8o/discussion

New discussion. https://groups.google.com/d/topic/comp.lang.postscript/BvMSQeWjflQ/discussion

Scribe was used to produce the first edition PostScript Language Reference Manual. http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/en/ps/sdk/5042.Opt_Case_Study.pdf

The wikipedia page mentions some curious history around scribe. Apparently, it was the change in licence and resulting exhorbitant price-hike for the software (from free to very expensive) that was so upsetting to a certain programmer named Richard Stallman that he founded an organization called the Free Software Foundation and began writing its first package, texinfo. And the rest is history.

Additional background material.

RICHARD FURUTA
Important papers in the history of document preparation systems: basic sources
http://cajun.cs.nott.ac.uk/compsci/epo/papers/volume5/issue1/ep057rf.pdf

The PUB System. A similar program of similar vintage.
http://www.nomodes.com/pub_manual.html

Robert D. Cameron
Markup and Style: History and Philosophy
http://www.cs.sfu.ca/~cameron/Teaching/470/markup1.html

ibis.ps's Issues

There is no working mechanism for tabstops.

There is a hacked tabstop effect attempted in the manual that is broken. It is left in the source as an irritant to provoke some sort of idea of what to do about it.

.... some years later....
Let's give this issues list a shot.

Is there a mechanism for (nested) lists ?

I skimmed the manual and found no mention of lists, like those

• make pizza
  • flour
  • water
  • tomato sauce
  • salami
• bring out trash

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It looks like this isn't supported. If there's a plan to do so, I'd highly appreciate learning about it. Or, whether there are other ps libraries for markup rendering. Thanks in advance!