!subnode	Once upon a time
!ignore_links

It was autumn 1994 when I wrote some little programs for which I needed an
ASCII manual, an online help and a printed documentation.

In all cases I began writing the ASCII manual. In a copy of it I inserted
hypertext commands. Finally the ASCII manual was imported into a text
processor, layouted and printed. It didn't take a long time for me to
recognize that this was an inefficient work: if there were any changes in
one of the files both the others had to be changed in the same way. And if
there were lots of changes it was necessary to start the whole procedure
right from the beginning.

When I finished these manuals I said to myself: ""Oh no, Dirk, there
(!I)must(!i) be another and easier way to get different versions of one text
file!"".

January 1995 I started to think about a new text format with the project
name ""UDO"" (as the abbreviation for (!B)U(!b)niversal (!B)DO(!b)cument).
The UDO syntax should be easy to learn and flexible enough and so I decided
to create a syntax like (!LaTeX). Next to this I began writing the software
that was able to convert this new text format into ASCII, ST-Guide and
(!LaTeX): UDO was born!

At this time UDO was really a small program with only some features. The
syntax contained about 10 commands and the source code was about 10~KB
large. Nevertheless this small hack was of a great help for myself and the
upper described horror scenario was history.

Since this time UDO has been growing up day by day. UDO now supports many
different text formats, it offers a large variety of layouting commands,
it's available for different operating system and the size of its source code
and documentation is now a hundred times larger than it was in former days.

In these two years UDO has become to an operating system independent, very
powerful and --- proverbially said --- universal tool.
