Ivoatex

[Markus Demleitner]

Dear VO enthusiasts,

There has been some unhappyness with authoring tools for IVOA
documents for a while -- while the various office formats cannot
really be used with version control systems (and pose substantial
interoperability problems), the existing markup-based efforts have
all had various issues.  After having promoted one of these, ivoadoc,
for a while, I had to realise that the relatively clumsy input format
and the shaky tooling probably will preclude widespread acceptance.

Hence, based on work by Mark Taylor, Sebastien Derriere and Paul
Harrison, I've now started ivoatex, which uses TeX as input format
and should immediately work wherever a reasonable TeX distribution
and GNU make is present -- I expect that should be the case just
about wherever science is done these days.

It's certainly still in development yet (I'm using it to review 
IVOA Identifiers), but I'd consider it fit for wider consumption and
of course would welcome people helping to push it along.

So, if you're about to start a new IVOA document (notes included) or
plan to do substantial revisions on an old one, please at least have
a quick look at ivoatex.  It is available from volute, with a brief
introduction available at

http://volute.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/projects/ivoapub/ivoatex/README

In case you're wondering how instance documents would look like,
check out the identifiers revision at

http://volute.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/projects/registry/Identifiers/

Cheers,

      Markus