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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  >   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.

  > Could you please point to the place where I can read about the different
  > generated output?

They are in the Texinfo manual.  Look at node "Indicating", which is
section 7.1 in the version I have in Info.

(In the Info version of the file, the title of the node for @code is
actually formatted wrong.  It has single quotes around `@code' in the
title itself.  Texinfo does have some problems that need fixing, and
it is hard to fix anything in it.)

  > One key reason I worry about going down that road is that I suspect it
  > would complicate org's syntax. Two key benefits of org mode is that the
  > basic syntax is simple and it maps reasonably consistently acorss
  > different output formats. However, this flexibility does come at a cost.
  > To provide consistency across export formats, the basic formatting
  > 'concepts' need to be somewhat 'generalised', which means at times you
  > will loose some of the more advanced or sophisticated formatting power
  > of some export back-ends. 

I suspect we are slightly miscommunicating, because Texinfo already
generates several different formats of output, and each markup construct
is carefully defined about how it should appear in each output format.

So I'm sure it is possible to define additional markup constucts and
make each one do, in each output format, what Texinfo would (or does)
do with it.

The only hard part is finding syntax for them.

  > As pointed out elswhere in this thread, org could support missing
  > texinfo syntax using texinfo specific blocks. However, that isn't a
  > great experience from an authoring perspective. It is fine if you only
  > need to do it occasionally, but if you have to constantly add such
  > blocks in order to get really well formatted texinfo output,

This is rather vague.  Why do you thik this would be difficult to use
Can we find a solution to make it easy to use?

We don't have to be limited to whichever escape syntaxes Org already
satisfies.  This use is _important_.  For this, it is worth making new
ones.




-- 
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)