Vadim Zaytsev, Ralf Lämmel. A Unified Format for Language Documents. In Pre-proceedings of the Third International Conference on Software Language Engineering (SLE 2010). Volume CS-Report 10–12 of Eindhoven, The Netherlands, October 2010.
We have analyzed a substantial number of language documentation artifacts, including language standards, language specifications, language reference manuals, as well as internal documents of standardization bodies. We have reverse-engineered their intended internal structure, and compared the results. The Language Document Format (LDF), was developed to specifically support the documentation domain. We have also integrated LDF into an engineering discipline for language documents including tool support, for example, for rendering language documents, extracting grammars and samples, and migrating existing documents into LDF. The definition of LDF, tool support for LDF, and LDF applications are freely available through SourceForge.