<! banner_id > Yodl is not a word processor, not even an editor. At first glance you might say, yeah, Yodl is just yet oneother document language.. why learn it? First of all, Yodl may lower the threshold of new users to start writing documents. An example of an excellent, though not very user-friendly document language is LaTeX. Typing all the backslash and curly brace characters in LaTeX and remembering that an asterisk must be typed as <code>$*$</code> may be hard at first. In such situations, a properly configured Yodl macro set removes these obstacles and thereby helps novices. Yodl is designed to be easy to learn. As the Yodl package is growing, so is the manual. The ease of `learning Yodl' may thus somewhat diminish, but just keep in mind: as long as you need just plain texts, Yodl does OK. If you want more functionality, e.g., the composition of manual pages for Unix, dig into the documentation. Second, Yodl permits to create more than one macro set, defining the same commands, but leading to different output actions. Thereby, the same input file can be converted to several output formats, depending on the loaded macro set. In this, Yodl is a `general front' document language, which converts a Yodl document to a specialized language for further processing. This was of course one of my reasons to write Yodl: I needed a good converter for either LaTeX or HTML. Third, Yodl always allows an `escape route' to the output format. Most situations can be handled with Yodl macros, but sure enough, some users will want special actions for a given output format. A typical example for the necessity of such an escape route is the typesetting of mathematical formulas. Say you want to use Yodl for a document that is converted either to LaTeX (being a very good mathematical typesetter) or to HTML (a very poor mathematical typesetter). An approach might be to decide <em>inside the document</em> how to typeset a mathematical formula. Yodl provides conditional command processing to accomplish this. The decision would be based on the output format: for LaTeX, you'd typeset the formula using all the facilities that LaTeX offers, and for HTML you'd use poor-mans typesetting. Typically, other pre-processors for documents don't allow such escape routes. Well, Yodl does. <!-- if this file ./Documentation/footer.html.in is present, it is included automatically by add-html-footer, and replaces the simple standard footer substitutions: * index, * package name * package name * ENV:WEBMASTER, * ENV:WEBMASTER --> <hr> Go <a href=>back</a> to index of Yodl. <p> Please send Yodl questions and comments to <a href="mailto:yodl@icce.rug.nl"> <em>yodl@icce.rug.nl</em></a>. <p> <!-- package Yodl Yodl --> Please send comments on these web pages to <a href="mailto:(address unknown)"><em>(address unknown)</em></a> <p> Copyright (c) 1997, 1998, 1999 Karel Kubat and Jan Nieuwenhuizen. <p> Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.<p> <hr><font size=-1> This page was built from Yodl-1.31.18 by <address><br>Stew Benedict <<a href=\"mailto:(address unknown)\">(address unknown)</a>>, Sat Jan 18 18:43:45 2003 EST.</address><p></font></BODY> </html>
