2001 May: Pythonization and Multi-target Idea

Guess who will speak:

"I've started to write my Regular Expression book and used the txt2sgml.sed marked text format. This way I could convert it to sgml (then to HTML using sgml2html tool) and quickly check on the browser how the book was going. As 'quick' and 'sgml2html' don't match, I've modified the SED script to a txt2html.sed tool, generating HTML directly. [...] The publisher used Adobe PageMaker software to format books and it was a problem for a Linux guy like me. But I was happy to know that PageMaker had a tagged HTML-like language, so I've started to turn my script into a txt2pagemaker.sed tool. I've ended up with three similar SED scripts, converting my texts to sgml, HTML and PageMaker. And some other Shell scripts were made to extract the book TOC (Table Of Contents) and do post formatting. At the middle of the book writing, I had the idea to join it all in a single tool, and choose Python as the language. TXT2TAGS was born."