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	1	# ptolemy
	2
	3	**WARNING: STILL SUPER EARLY IN DEVELOPMENT, AND MAY NEVER GO ANYWHERE
	4	AT ALL.**
	5
	6	The motivation behind Ptolemy is to address some minor gripes about
	7	Pandoc as a library. Let's be clear: Pandoc is _awesome_. It's amazing
	8	both as a utility and as a library, and a ridiculous amount of work
	9	has gone into making it as cool as it is.
	10
	11	One of the major strengths of Pandoc is that it's frankly huge. It's
	12	got all kinds of amazing features and implements a ridiculous amount
	13	of stuff. The downside to that is that when you want to use Pandoc as
	14	a library, you often only want a tiny subset of its functionality.
	15	Maybe you want to parse Markdown and RST, and produce HTML. Maybe
	16	you want to pull in HTML but also spit out LaTeX. With Pandoc, you
	17	can't go in a little bit: you have to get it _all_.
	18
	19	This library is an experiment in building a heavily Pandoc-inspired
	20	system with a more modular structure. With Ptolemy, you can select
	21	just the readers and writers you want and compose them together
	22	without having to draw in the the hundred-odd modules that compose
	23	Pandoc proper. It also should simplify plugging in new modules to
	24	a Pandoc-like ecosystem: I could, for example, create a new markup
	25	format and easily translate it to the Ptolemy internal format and
	26	then use existing Ptolemy writers with it.
	27
	28	_That said_, it might turn out that this is no net win at all. We'll
	29	see!
	30
	31	## What Does It Look Like?
	32
	33	This doesn't actually work yet, but it will look something like
	34	this. This program will depend on `ptolemy-reader-markdown`,
	35	`ptolemy-writer-html` and `text`:
	36
	37	~~~.haskell
	38	import qualified Data.Text as Text
	39	import qualified Text.Ptolemy.Markdown.Writer as MS
	40	import qualified Text.Ptolemy.HTML.Writer as HTML
	41
	42	main :: IO
	43	main = do
	44	cs <- Text.getContents
	45	case MD.readSlackdown MD.defaultOpts cs of
	46	Left err -> putStrLn err
	47	Right pt -> Text.putStrLn (HTML.writeHtmlStrict pt)
	48	~~~
	49
	50	## Why The Name?
	51
	52	The name _Ptolemy_ is a Greek name that was given to a number of famous
	53	Greek and Egyptian historical figures, but I chose it for this project
	54	for two reasons:
	55
	56	- Like "Pandoc", "Ptolemy" starts with a P, and
	57	- The Rosetta Stone, the multilingual decree that survived and served
	58	much later as Europe's key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs, was
	59	made on the orders of King Ptolemy V.