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

[David O'Toole <dto@gnu.org>]

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I'm forwarding my response to the list, as I mistakenly sent it only
to Xavier...


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From: David O'Toole <dto@gnu.org>
To: "Xavier Maillard" <zedek@gnu.org>
Subject: Re: [Emacs-orgmode] org-publish future ?
Date: Mon, 05 Jun 2006 17:18:41 -0400
Message-ID: <m3d5dnjo7i.fsf@gnu.org>


Hi Xavier, 

Muse is for people who wish to write all their documents with a single
markup syntax, and produce multiple target output formats from this
input. One result of this is that the markup syntax is an intersection
of the capabilities of the target output formats, so it is (in my
opinion) lacking in expressiveness in some situations.

Org-publish is still incomplete, but I imagine it is for people who
write directly in multiple formats depending on the situation, and
want a single system for publishing ALL their content. I write in
*.org when I am organizing, doing my webpages, or writing documents; I
write in LaTeX when writing larger documents or reports; I write in
emacs lisp when programming. So far org-publish doesn't support LaTeX
documents, but I can imagine a plugin that will create PDF files and
upload them whenever the .tex source changes. 

I think these styles are different enough to both deserve existing :-)

(Emacs-wiki is obsolete; muse is its successor. I don't know much about
BHL mode.)

You will have to choose the one that suits your style.

Some thoughts on the future of org-publish:

1. Report generation. I would like to be able to produce HTML reports
   of completed tasks, and possibly more sophisticated things like
   timeclock summaries. This will require org-publish to be able to
   scan text for some kind of tag, and replace the tag with
   appropriate org markup (tables of tasks etc.) Then org.el can just
   process the file, business as usual, because it will contain
   nothing but org markup.

2. More project planning support. I would like to be able to do Gantt
   charts in HTML. 

The reason for this stuff is, I am starting to do work as an
independent consultant, and I would like to be able to produce nice
reports and project plans for clients.  I used to do this with
Planner/Emacs-wiki but the rather limiting markup sometimes frustrated
me. I also need to be able to keep detailed records of time spent on
different tasks, so that I can produce accurate bills.

By the way, I used to generate nice PDFs of my reports with Firefox
and ps2pdf. I think, provided it can be made into a batch operation,
that this is a perfectly acceptable way of producing PDF output from
org.

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?

"Xavier Maillard" <zedek@gnu.org> writes:

> Hi,
>
> I was looking on emacswiki searching for publish engines for Emacs.
> Actually, I have found at least three of them:
>
> 1. muse
> 2. emacs-wiki
> 3. bhl
>
> Adding org-publish to this list, we got 4 engines that do merely the same
> thing except for org-publish which offers less features. So what is the
> current goal for org-publish exactly ? Is there any possiblity that
> org-publish be incorporated into something bigger and more insteresting for
> us as end users. are there any plans for orc-publish if at all ?
>
> I know David is quite busy with all his projects but I would like to know if
> it is worth I learn org-publish in depth or switch to something else. So
> David, what are your plans ? :)
>
> Regards
> -- 
> Xavier Maillard
> _______________________________________________
> Emacs-orgmode mailing list
> Emacs-orgmode@gnu.org
> http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacs-orgmode

-- 
Dave O'Toole
dto@gnu.org

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-- 
Dave O'Toole
dto@gnu.org

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