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@nantucketebooks I'm now curious about what Shanty is, what it looks like and stuff; do you have a public cheat sheet, crash course, introduction, or demo document I can look at?

@blake Shanty is a markup language for writing books.

Here's the text file for A Christmas Carol: https://nantucketebooks.com/ebooks/pd/christmascarol/christmascarol.shanty

Here's the text file from which my blog posts are built: https://nantucketebooks.com/blog/blog.txt

Here is the manual: https://nantucketebooks.com/shantydocs

I'll be publishing a new manual for the language in a few weeks.

I am happy to answer any questions!

@mcepl Let me get to the heart of the matter: why design something new?

Shanty came about because I knew the kind of e-book I wanted to make, one that I would be proud to share. The question, then, was: what is the bare minimum I would have to write in terms of markup, so I could convert it into that e-book?

(To be continued)

@mcepl
In another life, I used a markup language called Fountain to write screenplays. I thought about the experience of writing with Fountain, how good it felt, and apply that to writing for books.

There are some differences to Markdown: I use {{text||url}} for hyperlinks. This is because, after years of using Markdown-format links on Reddit, I still can't get my head around [text](url). So, the curly bracket form works well for me.

@mcepl I use Shanty to write blog posts because I'm using it so much already. I've found I've been able to create blog posts quite quickly with it.

To answer your question of 'why', I designed Shanty because it's a tool that lets me do my work better. And I look forward to introducing it to others later next month when the new manual is published.