Carsten Dominik <carsten.dominik@gmail.com> writes:

> Besides the obvious interaction, using the Muse engine to produce
> other export formats, can you think of more ways to interact?

Organization of work into publishable projects comes to mind.

One nice feature of Muse is that you can specify the major mode to
call on files inside of a project.

>> One of the plans for the next release of Muse + 1 (3.04) is to
>> support publishing documents that use other markup syntaxes, such
>> as Markdown and reSt.  Perhaps org-mode syntax could be supported
>> as well.
>
> I have actually been thinking about an org-to-muse converter as a
> possibility for easy expansion to many more export formats.  So I
> have a number of ideas about what would be needed and where the
> difficulties lie.  A short appetizer:
>
> - Headline detection should be trivial, however
> - Org-mode uses (at least: can use) many more levels than the 4
>   available in Muse now.  The Org-mode exporters just switch to
>   itemized lists at some headline level.

Muse can publish headings beyond the 3rd level now.  The only
requirement for the built-in heading publishing function is that
either:

 1. The same markup is used for each level beyond the 3rd, or

 2. The markup for different levels varies only by the number of the
    level.

Even if none of these conditions are met, it's easy to tell Muse to
use a different (custom) function for publishing headings.  I do
something like this with Planner headings, since they have level 1 ==
<h2>, and use some specialized <div> stuff.

> - Org-mode allows plain lists (itemize, bullet, numbered) of
>   arbitrary depth and uses indentation to see the end of items.
>   Muse, if I remember correctly, has one level of lists and is
>   therefore very relaxed about indentation in lists

Muse now supports different levels of lists in its development
version, and that aspect is very stable (if undocumented).  Levels are
based on initial indentation.

> - Apart from plain lists, indentation is not syntactically significant
>   in Org-mode, it is more visual sugar to make outline easily readable.
>   Muse uses indentation for syntax, to quote text, for example.
> - Links are similar, but not identical.
> - Org-mode table lines also start with "|".  Table headlines are
>   implicit, before the first horizontal line in the table.  No
>   footer lines.
> - etc.....

This will indeed involve some fine-tuning of the rules.  It should be
feasible though.

The tricky thing will be to make these rules project-dependent, so
that people have the option of having two projects with different
markup syntaxes.

One way of accomplishing this might be to make the regexps in most
publishing rules to be variables, so that buffer-local values for them
can be set.

-- 
Michael Olson -- FSF Associate Member #652 -- http://www.mwolson.org/
Interests: Emacs Lisp, text markup, protocols -- Jabber: mwolson_at_hcoop.net
  /` |\ | | | IRC: mwolson on freenode.net: #hcoop, #muse, #PurdueLUG
 |_] | \| |_| Project involvement: Emacs, Muse, Planner, ERC, EMMS