Doconce is two things:

  o Doconce is a very simple and minimally tagged markup language that
    looks like ordinary ASCII text (much like what you would use in an
    email), but the text can be transformed to numerous other formats,
    including HTML, Pandoc, Google wiki, LaTeX, PDF, reStructuredText
    (reST), Sphinx, Epytext, and also plain text (where non-obvious
    formatting/tags are removed for clear reading in, e.g.,
    emails). From reST you can (via `rst2*` programs) go to XML, HTML,
    LaTeX, PDF, OpenOffice, and from the latter (via `unoconv`) to
    RTF, numerous MS Word formats (including MS Office Open XML),
    DocBook, PDF, MediaWiki, XHTML. From Pandoc one can generate
    Markdown, reST, LaTeX, HTML, PDF, DocBook XML, OpenOffice, GNU
    Texinfo, MediaWiki, RTF, Groff, and other formats.

  o Doconce is a working strategy for never duplicating information.
    Text is written in a single place and then transformed to
    a number of different destinations of diverse type (software
    source code, manuals, tutorials, books, wikis, memos, emails, etc.).
    The Doconce markup language support this working strategy.
    The slogan is: "Write once, include anywhere".



Here are some Doconce features:

  * Doconce markup does include tags, so the format is more tagged than
    Markdown and Pandoc, but less than reST, and very much less than
    LaTeX and HTML.
  * Doconce can be converted to plain *untagged* text,
    often desirable for computer programs and email.
  * Doconce has good support for copying in parts of computer code
    directly from the source code files via regular expressions
    for the start and end lines.
  * Doconce has full support for LaTeX math and integrates well
    with big LaTeX projects (books).
  * Doconce is almost self-explanatory and is a handy starting point
    for generating documents in more complicated markup languages, such
    as Google wiki, LaTeX, and Sphinx. A primary application of Doconce
    is just to make the initial versions of a Sphinx or wiki document.
  * Contrary to the similar (and superior) Pandoc translator, Doconce
    supports Sphinx, Google wiki, Creole wiki (for bitbucket.org),
    lots of computer code environments in LaTeX, and a special exercise
    syntax. Doconce also also runs preprocessors (including Mako)
    such that the author can mix ordinary text with programming
    construction for generating parts of the text.

Doconce was particularly written for the following sample applications:

  * Large books written in LaTeX, but where many pieces (computer demos,
    projects, examples) can be written in Doconce to appear in other
    contexts in other formats, including plain HTML, Sphinx, wiki, or MS Word.

  * Software documentation, primarily Python doc strings, which one wants
    to appear as plain untagged text for viewing in Pydoc, as reStructuredText
    for use with Sphinx, as wiki text when publishing the software at
    web sites, and as LaTeX integrated in, e.g., a thesis.

  * Quick memos, which start as plain text in email, then some small
    amount of Doconce tagging is added, before the memos can appear as
    Sphinx web pages, MS Word documents, or in wikis.

History: Doconce was developed in 2006 at a time when most popular
markup languages used quite some tagging.  Later, almost untagged
markup languages like Markdown and Pandoc became popular. Doconce is
not a replacement of Pandoc, which is a considerably more
sophisticated project. Moreover, Doconce was developed mainly to
fulfill the needs for a flexible source code base for books with much
mathematics and computer code.

Disclaimer: Doconce is a simple tool, largely based on interpreting
and handling text through regular expressions. The possibility for
tweaking the layout is obviously limited since the text can go to
all sorts of sophisticated markup languages. Moreover, because of
limitations of regular expressions, some formatting of Doconce syntax
may face problems when transformed to HTML, LaTeX, Sphinx, and similar
formats.


