Re: Org mode and Emacs (was: Convert README.org to plain text README while installing package)

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

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  > Making org mode syntax equivalent to texinfo syntax seems like a
  > mistake to me.

If this succeeds, it would be an important advance for the GNU system.
We would replace Texinfo with a much cleaner system, easier to use and
more maintainable.  Not solely for Emacs, but for ALL our
documentation!

                   The original idea was to have a light weight syntax which
  > is easyh to learn, not create a clone of texinfo. Besides, I suspect it
  > would be very difficult to maintain backwards compatibility. 

These are real concerns, but they are not real certainties.  If we look
for solutions, we may find good ones.

I hope someone will give it a try.

One of Texinfo's crucial features is a wide range of semantic markup
constructs, each of which can generate different output depending on
the output format.  For instance, Texinfo has @var, @emph and @dfn,
all of which generate italics in printed output, but they differ in
what they generate for other output formats.  There are probably 15
other such constructs.

These constructs make it possible to carry out our documentation style
constructs.

Does Org format have the ability to make all these distinctions?
If not, I suspect that the Org mode documentation isn't following
all our style conventions for documentation.

There is nothing fundamentally hard about supporting these
distinctions.  Can someone please examine which ones Org supports and
which ones not, and propose exensions for the ones not yet supported?

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)