Re: [David O'Toole] Fwd: Re: org-publish future ?

[Carsten Dominik <dominik@science.uva.nl>]

On Jun 5, 2006, at 23:19, David O'Toole wrote:
>
> On a related note, Carsten are you reading? Something came up in IRC
> discussion, about making it easier to convert org documents to other
> formats. Although I am a bit resistant to the idea, especially since
> it would take things in a more muse-ish direction, I remember you had
> mentioned making a "cleaned up" publishing function that produces an
> intermediate format (s-expressions?) that could be transformed into
> something else. Are you still thinking about this?

My interest in exporting Org-mode to more formats is quite limited.  I 
am not using Org-mode to write books.  And if I want to produce a book, 
moving away from the fantastic toolset for LaTeX available under Emacs 
to something that limits my possibilities to a subset of LaTeX is a 
loss, not a gain.

Personally, I am not often in a situation where I need to produce many 
different output formats of a document.  The only major application for 
this is documentation, for example of computer programs produce 
documentation.  There are many systems that can do this, for example 
POD (developed for the perl documentation), TeXInfo, muse.  I don't see 
why Org-mode needs to be able to do the same.

The one thing I would be interested in is indeed to produce one very 
general format that would allow people to do with it whatever they 
want.  My feeling is that such a format could be based on the current 
HTML exporter because it does a complete structural analysis of an 
Org-mode document, and the output could be some kind of semantic-only 
HTML, or XML, or whatever.  I have not taken any steps toward 
implementing this, and right now I don't see it happening.

- Carsten