AFT Stuff

It's been a couple of years since I've done anything with AFT. I have a few ideas I've wanted to implement for a while, but I am tiring with mucking with the core of AFT and causing distress with any of my (few) users who wonder if they should upgrade. Sometimes a new feature may break old stuff or sometimes I roll in fixes with the new features.

As far as I can tell, AFT users install the version of AFT current to when they discovered it, use it and then resist upgrading (why upgrade when the tool does what you want)?

So, I am going to freeze AFT against any new features and add features by way of AFT add-ons.
These add-ons will be separately download-able and work with the AFT you have installed.

Here are some of the potential AFT add-ons:

• aft-indexer -- Create an index on an AFT file against words in a separate document, write out a new AFT file that includes AFT markup for an index and run AFT against that.
• aft-fixtabs -- Take an AFT document and smartly fix any tabstop errors. Output a new AFT document with tabs or N spaces for tabs.
  
• aft-ft -- Convert "free text" (somewhat intelligently) to AFT format.
• aft-simple -- A newer, simpler markup format (influenced by lessons learned) that produce standard AFT output.

The add-ons will be written in Perl or C and conform to AFT's current policy of not requiring any additional Perl modules outside of a standard 5.x distribution.