Re: [Docutils-develop] Transforms...?

[Adam C. <ad...@ch...>]

On Fri, 05 Jul 2002 22:49:15 -0400 David Goodger
<go...@us...> wrote:

> > Would it be possible to replace this with a single construct, ie.
> > always using an list of authors (if there is only one author, it
> > would be a list containing only one entry) and determine from
> > context if it is many or a single? This way, it would work for
> > Swedish and for English, since for English you can have the
> > mappings:
> > 
> > 'author':nodes.author,
> > 'author':nodes.authors
> 
> I assume you mean::
> 
>     'author':nodes.author,
>     'authors':nodes.authors
>            ^

Actually, I meant:

'author':nodes.authors,
'authors':nodes.authors
 
Basically, the idea is to remove the difference between plural and singular
for the use for the most part (only retain it where the language fits).

> I suppose an "authors" element could revert to "author" if it only
> contains a single author, so yes, that's feasible.  For Swedish, I'd
> suggest mapping a compound word like "one-author" to nodes.author;
> that way it wouldn't be chosen accidentally but the meaning would be
> explicit.  Like this::
> 
>     'författare-singular':nodes.author,
>     'författare':nodes.authors

Wouldn't it be possible to leave 'författare-singular' out totally? I mean,
since nodes.authors would be converted into nodes.author if there is only one
author, 'författare-singular' isn't really of much value at all.

> The ``docutils.transforms.frontmatter.DocInfo`` transform will need
> some work, probably in the ``extract_authors`` method.  Care to give
> it a try?  Not urgent.

I might take a look, but there are other pressing matters that feel a bit more
important right now. :)

[FAQ directive]

> > I actually have a FAQ document, where these directives would perhaps
> > be usefull, although I have found that using section titles for the
> > question and section contents works fine for a FAQ.
> 
> That's a good idea.  Except, you can only have short questions because
> titles can only be one line long.  Details!

Hmmm... I read that part through, and the conclusion seems to be:

> However, a simple enumerated or bulleted list will do just fine for syntax.
> A directive could treat the list specially; e.g. the first paragraph could
> be treated as a question, the remainder as the answer (multiple answers
> could be represented by nested lists).

But with that aproach you have the same problem: you can only have short
questions! Wouldn't it make more sense to use a bulleted list for the
questions and answers, and alternating between them (ie. the first bullet is a
question, the second the answer, the third the question, and so on)?

---
Adam Chodorowski <ad...@ch...>

FORTRAN? The syntactically incorrect statement "DO 10 I = 1.10" will parse and
generate code creating a variable, DO10I, as follows: "DO10I = 1.10"  If that
doesn't terrify you, it should.