Skribe is a programming language designed for implementing electronic
documents. It is mainly designed for the writing of technical documents
such as the documentation of computer programs. With Skribe these
documents can be rendered using various tools and technologies. For
instance, a Skribe document can be
compiled to an HTML file
that suits Web browser, it can be compiled to a TeX file in order to
produce a high-quality printed document, and so on.
Everyone needing to design web pages, info documents, man pages or
Postscript files can use Skribe. In particular, there is no need
for programming skills in order to use Skribe. Skribe can be used as
any text description languages such as TeX, LaTeX or HTML.
There are three main reasons for using Skribe:
-
It is easier to type in Skribe texts than other text description formats.
The need for meta keyword, that is, words used to describe
the structure of the text and not the text itself, is very limited.
-
Skribe is highly skilled for computing texts. It is very common that
one needs to automatically produce parts of the text. This can
be very simple such as, for instance, the need to include inside a text,
the date of the last update or the number of the last revision.
Sometimes it may be more complex. For instance, one may be willing to
embed inside a text the result of a complex arithmetic computation. Or
even, you may want to include some statistics about that
text, such as, the number of words, paragraphs, sections, and so on.
Skribe makes these sort of text manipulation easy whereas other
systems rely on the use of text preprocessors.
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The same source file can be compiled to various output formats such
as HTML, Info pages, man pages, Postscript, etc.