1. Scribe User Manual -- Getting Started

1. Scribe User Manual -- Getting Started

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Getting Started

Hello World!
Adding colors and fonts
Structured documents
Hyperlinks
Compiling Scribe documents


Chapters

Getting Started
Syntax
Standard Library
Hyperlinks and References
Index
Bibliography
Computer programs
Graphical User Interfaces
Customization
Scribe style files
Editing Scribe Programs
Compiling Scribe programs
Compiling Texi documents
Using Bibtex databases
Functions and Variables


Scribe

Home page:Scribe

Documentation:user
expert


In this chapter the syntax of a Scribe text is presented informally. In particular, the Scribe syntax is compared to the HTML syntax. It is also presented how Scribe source files can be processed.

1.1 Hello World!

In this section we show how to produce very simple electronic documents with Scribe. Suppose that we want to produce the following Web document:


Hello World!

This is a very simple text.

The HTML source file for such a page should look like:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Hello world Example</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<H1>Hello World!</H1>

This is a very simple text.
</BODY>
</HTML>

In Scribe, the very same document must be written:

(document :title [Hello World!] [
This is a very simple text.])


1.2 Adding colors and fonts

Let us suppose that we want now to colorize and change the face of some words such as:


Hello World!

This is a very simple text.

The HTML source file for such a document should look like:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Hello world Example</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<H1>Hello World!</H1>

This is a <B>very</B> <I>simple</I> <FONT color="red">text</FONT>.
</BODY>
</HTML>

In Scribe, the very same document must be written:

(document :title [Hello World!] [
This is a ,(bold [very]) ,(it [simple]) ,(color :fg [red] [text]).])

As one may notice the Scribe version is much more compact than the HTML one.


1.3 Structured documents

For large documents there is an obvious need of structure. Scribe documents may contain chapters, sections, subsections, itemize, ... For instance, if we want to extend our previous example to:


Hello World!



1. A first Section

This is a very simple text.


2. A second Section

That contains an itemize construction:
  . first item
  . second item
  . third item

The Scribe source for that text is:

(document :title [Hello World!] [

(section :title [A first Section] [
 This is a ,(bold [very]) ,(it [simple]) ,(color :fg [red] [text]).])

(section :title [A second Section] [
 That section contains an ,(bold itemize) construction:
 ,(itemize [first item]
           [second item]
           [third item])])])


1.4 Hyperlinks

A Scribe document may contain links to chapters, to sections, to other Scribe documents or Web pages. The following Scribe source code illustrates these various kinds of links:

(document :title [Various links] [

(section :title "A Section" [
The first link points to an external web page. Here we point to a
,(ref :url [http://slashdot.org/] [Slashdot])
web page. The second one points to the second
,(ref :section [A second Section] [Section])
of that document.])

(section :title [A second Section] [
The last links points to the first
,(ref :scribe [user.scr] :figure [A simple web page] [Figure])
of the Scribe User Manual.])])


1.5 Compiling Scribe documents

There are several ways to render a Scribe document. It can be statically compiled by the scribe compiler to various formats such as HTML, LaTeX, man and so on. It can be compiled on-demand by the mod_scribe Apache Scribe module. In this section we only present static compilation.

Let us suppose a Scribe text located in a file file.scr. In order to compile to various formats one must type in:

$ scribe file.scr -o file.html  # This produces an HTML file.
$ scribe file.scr -o file.tex   # This produces a TeX file.
$ scribe file.scr -o file.man   # This produces a man page.
$ scribe file.scr -o file.info  # This produces an info page.



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Last update Sat Feb 9 22:39:30 2002