On Mon, 23 Feb 2009 Uwe Lück submitted the new package

nicetext

to CTAN.

Location on CTAN: /macros/latex/contrib/nicetext/ Summary description: ``minimal'' markup for simple text (Wikipedia style) and documentation License type: lppl

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The NICETEXT bundle offers ``minimal'' markup syntax for rather simple kinds of text. The code you type should show little more characters than are printed, though you get LaTeX quality. We try to do away with backslashes, technical terms, and curly braces, which (a.o.) may cause musculoskeletal damages at PC keyboards <optional arghh>.

'wiki.sty' addresses general kinds of texts. 'niceverb.sty' is made for documenting LaTeX packages. 'niceverb.sty' especially offers [almost-]WYSIWIG for meta-variables (macro arguments) and for referring to commands (and their syntax) in footnotes, section titles etc. E.g., to typeset the syntax description

foo[<opt-arg>]{<mand-arg>} you just type foo[<opt-arg>]{<mand-arg>} !-)

One source of inspiration is the markup syntax that is used in editing Wikipedia pages. The package 'wiki.sty' of the bundle offers a very similar syntax as a LaTeX front-end. It suffices for italics, boldface, sectioning, and certain list-like environments. This is also similar to 'easylatex',

http.//www.ctan.org/pkg/easylatex

which is more powerful and uses Perl. 'wiki.sty', by contrast, is just a LaTeX package, working on any TeX installation.

'niceverb' is not ready in two essential respects, but I thought it should be released in time for German Carnival (read on in README) ----------------------------------------------------------------------

This package is located at http://mirror.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/nicetext/ . More information is at http://tug.ctan.org/info/?id=nicetext (if the package is new it may take a day for that information to appear). We are supported by the TeX Users Group http://www.tug.org . Please join a users group; see http://www.tug.org/usergroups.html . _______________________________________________

Thanks for the upload.

For the CTAN Team Rainer Schöpf