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Pillar syntax
Last updated at 5:44 pm UTC on 30 June 2018
The Pillar syntax is a wiki like syntax extracted by Damien Cassou from the Pier content management system. The Pillar project offers transformers into several target formats such as LaTeX, html or markdown.

http://www.humane-assessment.com/blog/writing-pillar-books-with-the-gtinspector
https://github.com/pillar-markup/pillar-documentation
https://www.cheatography.com/benjaminvanryseghem/cheat-sheets/pillar/

Example of a small markup snippet in the Pillar syntax (with rendering as a PRDocument object model:
Pillar document example

History

J.F. Rick writes on the Pharo development list about the Pillar syntax

Wed, Jul 2, 2014 at 12:05 PM
Reply-To: Pharo Development List
To: Pharo Development List

...
Back in 1999, I created ComSwiki out of the beginning that was PWS Swiki (the first wiki to eschew camel case for links). One of the first things I did was to make changes to the markup to improve it. Of course, once we had some users and established content, all the decisions I made at that early point in the project were made permanent.

Looking at Pillar, it pretty much uses the syntax I created back then (with a few improvements).

I'm sure the markup just drifted through the Smalltalk community and was then adopted by Pillar. It's not a bad design but I've always felt that a better, more extensible syntax was possible. As usual, the good proved to be the enemy of the great.