Comment on Org Export Reference

[James Harkins <jamshark70@qq.com>]

I've been working on an export backend for personal use, and I find the 
documentation on worg to be... not quite what I need. In the spirit of 
suggesting an avenue for improvement, then:

The page covers a lot of details, but less in the way of context. For 
instance, the toolbox is documented extensively, but I didn't see a 
comprehensive list of the transcoding functions that a backend should 
implement, nor details of these functions' inputs, nor recommendations for 
handling elements that aren't obvious (tags, links, footnotes...). In my 
first attempt, I even left out ox-*-template -- I had no idea what the 
template was or its importance! (It is actually sort of covered on worg, 
but it's buried in a quoted docstring with nothing to highlight its rather 
crucial nature.)

I've had to infer these from ox-ascii.el, which also covers a lot of cases 
that aren't relevant to this exporter, making it hard to guess what is 
strictly necessary. The result for me has been rather remarkable amounts of 
wasted time.

I also wonder about documenting functions without documenting their 
arguments. Like, yesterday I was trying to use org-export-get-parent: 
first, find out that the function exists on worg, then switch to emacs and 
C-h f it to find out *really* how to use it. Why C-h f? Because the worg 
page says *nothing* about the arguments!

At the very least, another section needs to be added, listing the elements 
that need to be transcoded. Also some common cases might be nice, e.g., 
what's the canonical way to access tags? Properties? Typical cases for 
links that you wouldn't think of unless you already know what you're doing 
(but if you already knew what you're doing, you wouldn't be scouring the 
reference)?

I'll add that, despite some painful false starts, I've got a shocking 
amount of the elements working already. Some, that I might have expected to 
be hard (e.g., plain lists) were close to trivially easy! So I'd say the 
exporter design is a thing of beauty -- serious applause for this -- it's 
just that the entry point involves too much puzzling over source code and 
not enough well-organized explanation.

hjh

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