The Scripta Markup Language

Scripta is a simple, stripped down, yet powerful markup language intended for technical writing, though it can take on other tasks as well. Here are two examples of documents written in this language:

Here is a snippet of the rendered text for Austrialian Aboriginal Art:

and here is a snippet of the source text:

[link The Story of Aboriginal Art https://www.aboriginal-art-australia.com/aboriginal-art-library/the-story-of-aboriginal-art/]

| image
https://i.ibb.co/MsrWNxF/aboriginal.jpg

This snippet has two kinds of text. The first, a Scripta element, has the form [link The Story of Aboriginal Art URL]. The second is a Scripta block:

| image
https://i.ibb.co/MsrWNxF/aboriginal.jpg

That is all there is to Scripta: elements and blocks.

Some more examples: pure text is an element as are [i BODY] and [link LABEL URL]. A block has the form

| NAME
BODY

BODY is typically a sequence of elements separated by spaces, e.g.,

This is [i really] a test.  [b No kidding!]

For another example, consider a snippet of the rendered text for Virial Theorem:

Rendered text:

# Derivation

To explain the theorem, consider first the [term moment of inertia] of the system

| equation label:moment-of-inertia
I = sum_i m_i br_i^2

Up to a constant, its derivative is

| equation label:moment-of-inertia-deriv
frac(1,2) dot I =  sum_i m_i br_i cdot dot br_i = 
 sum_i br_i cdot bp_i

Here we see a new block, the equation block. Note that equations are automatically numbered. The body of the first equation block is

I = sum_i m_i br_i^2

rather than

I = \sum_i m_i \br_i^2

That is because Scripta implements ETeX, a simplified TeX format that is translated into the standard format for rendering. The snippet br is a TeX macro for making a bold-face “p”, defined elsehwere in the document by a mathmacros block:

| mathmacros
bp: {\mathop{\mathbf{p}}}
bq: {\mathop{\mathbf{q}}}
br: {\mathop{\mathbf{r}}}
bu: {\mathop{\mathbf{u}}}
bF: {\mathop{\mathbf{F}}}
ta: \left< #1 \right>

Despite its radical simplicity, Scripta is a powerful, expressive language. Documents written in Scripta can be exported to standard LaTeX or to PDF.