Re: Htmlize support, maintenance, and Org mode

[Timothy <orgmode@tec.tecosaur.net>]

Hi All,

I'm currently traveling, but it seems like it would be good to chime in here.

On Mon, Aug 14, 2023, at 5:22 PM, Ihor Radchenko wrote:
> Bastien Guerry <bzg@gnu.org> writes:
>
>> If not, then relying on engrave-faces, which is maintained and also
>> handles LaTeX, instead of htmlize, sounds like a good idea.
>
> I'd like to hear Timothy's opinion on this. He is the author of
> engrave-faces and the maintainer of ox-html.

So, I looked into htmlfontify ans htmlize quite a bit before and during my work on engrave-faces. I've forgotten quite a few of the details (particularly around internals) by this point, but still recall a fair bit and have an overall impression.

Engrave-faces heavily inspired by htmlize, and actually copies some methods from it. It was created to address two limitations I was running up against:
- The lack of support for other output formats
- The lack of support for not-the-current theme output

At this point, it's fairly stable and supports a superset of the capabilities of htmlize. It's a bit slower ATM, but I haven't found performance to be an issue in usage with Org exports. There are one or two more things it would be nice to do in future, but I don't anticipate any need to change the current public API.

I think it would make quite a bit of sense for it to be used more with Org, we can use it to provide a unified approach to source code highlighting. Currently this would just be LaTeX and HTML, but I'd like to extend code highlighting support to ASCII and ODT exports later on.

All the best,
Timothy.