AidaHelp_2

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Introduction

The Aida project is two-fold:

• it defines a simple common markup language, designed to describe structured text;

• it provides a compiler which translates the Aida syntax into various target formats (Html, Latex, Trac, Mediawiki, Text, Markdown,...).

This is useful to create and maintain documentations, help files, etc, which must be distributed on different supports (Web pages, PDF documents, Wiki pages,...). The
user writes his/her files using the common Aida Markup Language and converts them to the target format with the aida command.

The system is fast, flexible and extensible.
The core command aida is a strict parser (written using Bison and
Flex) which analyses files written in the Aida Markup Language and invokes
callbacks in order to convert them to the target format.

The aida command embeds a
Tcl language interpreter
and all the callbacks are written in Tcl: the Tcl scripts constitute
Aida's library. This architecture makes it easy to extend the library and
define new target formats. It is also very powerful because any Tcl code
can be sourced and evaluated within the Aida files and thus one can create
dynamic contents, generated on the fly.

Furthermore, the Aida files are highly parameterizable via a header and the entire system is configureable both at the admin's and at the user's level.