Bracetax

The Bracetax Project is:

• Bracetax: a simple and deterministic text-processing syntax;
• bracetax: an OCaml library manipulating the syntax (convert to HTML, LaTeX …);
• brtx: a command-line application using the bracetax library;
• tools: a few small tools related to the syntax (VIM syntax highlighting …).

The code is available under a permissive MIT license.

You can get a snapshot of the stable sources from Github: github.com/smondet/bracetax. The head of the master branch will always be considered as the most up-to-date and usable/stable version, binaries will become available if there is enough demand.

Bracetax follows the standard OASIS setup (with OCamlfind and OCamlbuild):

  ocaml setup.ml -configure  [--prefix /where/you/want]

  ocaml setup.ml -build

  ocaml setup.ml -install   (may require root privileges)

For now the documentations are:

• the Bracetax syntax reference;
• the brtx application usage;
• the documentation of the bracetax library;
• the tools usage.

One of the key features of this syntax is that there are only 3 special characters, hence you can sanitize any output with a simple `sed' filter:
| sed -e 's/\([{}#]\)/{\1}/g' |

For example, this HTML git-log has been generated with the command:

git log | sed -e 's/\([{}#]\)/{\1}/g' | awk '\
        /^commit / {print "{p}{t|{b|Commit:} "$2"}{br}"} \
        /^Author/  {print "   {t|{b|Author:} " $2 " " $3 "}{br}"} \
        /^Date/    {print "   {t|{b|Date:}" substr($0,6,length($0) - 3) "}{br}"} \
        /^    .+/  { print "{t|{i|" $0 "}}{br}" } \
        ' | brtx -html -link-css brtxdoc.css -doc \
            -title "Bracetax - git-log" -o git_log.html

We use the Bracetax syntax document as a complete example, here we can see:

• the source (colored by Vim, c.f. tools);
• the generated raw HTML;
• the generated PDF from LaTeX export;
• the generated PDF from LaTeX export with a style.

Using M4 (wikipedia), we get a “self-documenting document”:

• the generated HTML;
• the source (and the colored source);
• the generated latex file; and the corresponding PDF;
• the Makefile used to generate the example.

• Project homepage;
• project development page at Github.

• Sebastien Mondet.