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Writing and publishing with Emacs Muse (Linux.com)
Writing and publishing with Emacs Muse (Linux.com)
Posted Apr 9, 2007 19:31 UTC (Mon) by ajross (subscriber, #4563)Parent article: Writing and publishing with Emacs Muse (Linux.com)
I like the idea: a wiki-like markup designed for a broader range of ultimate document types. Sort of like a POD for publishing.
But I hate the implementation: all elisp? What would have been wrong with a set of command line tools (e.g. muse2latex, muse2html, etc...) and a plain muse-mode for emacs? Tying this thing to the editor seems to be a guaranteed way to make sure no one uses it for anything meaningful.
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Writing and publishing with Emacs Muse (Linux.com)
Posted Apr 9, 2007 19:33 UTC (Mon) by Los__D (subscriber, #15263) [Link]
Who told you that Emacs is an editor? ;)
Writing and publishing with Emacs Muse (Linux.com)
Posted Apr 9, 2007 19:36 UTC (Mon) by ajross (subscriber, #4563) [Link]
No no, don't get me wrong: I've been exclusively an emacs user for 13 years. But is anyone going to publish a non-trivial (i.e. more than one author/editor) document in something that can only be used from emacs?
Writing and publishing with Emacs Muse (Linux.com)
Posted Apr 9, 2007 19:39 UTC (Mon) by Los__D (subscriber, #15263) [Link]
Ahhh, very true.
Writing and publishing with Emacs Muse (Linux.com)
Posted Apr 12, 2007 14:34 UTC (Thu) by lysse (subscriber, #3190) [Link]
I don't think 'trivial' is exactly the term one might apply to "War and Peace"...
Perhaps you meant 'collaborative'?
Writing and publishing with Emacs Muse (Linux.com)
Posted Apr 12, 2007 14:42 UTC (Thu) by ajross (subscriber, #4563) [Link]
War and Peace is a non-trivial writing task. This is a tool for publishing, not writing per se. I can assure you that the original War and Peace was edited by at least one other human being, and took the effort of many people to typeset and print, so it wasn't trivial even by this definition. :)
Writing and publishing with Emacs Muse (Linux.com)
Posted Apr 9, 2007 19:56 UTC (Mon) by amk (subscriber, #19) [Link]
It might be possible to build command-line tools that are doing 'emacs -batch <something>' under the hood.
Writing and publishing with Emacs Muse (Linux.com)
Posted Apr 9, 2007 20:11 UTC (Mon) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link]
I agree with you on the niche vibe of it--it's a technical achievement, certainly, but rather narrowly targeted. I'm certain it will make a certain (very small) group of people quite happy. But it does seem to me to be a kind of Because We Could achievement...
Writing and publishing with Emacs Muse (Linux.com)
Posted Apr 9, 2007 23:19 UTC (Mon) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]
For whatever it is worth, wiki-like markup to printed form has been done before. For example The Zope Book was authored entirely in "Structured Text" which is a wiki cousin. The tools may not be as mature but the idea is sufficiently simple that many such implementations exist.
Jim's E-mail Mark-up Hints
Posted Apr 10, 2007 17:02 UTC (Tue) by AnswerGuy (subscriber, #1256) [Link]
As the editor for "The Answer Guy" for the Linux Gazette (later "The Answer Gang") for several years ... my wife developed and maintained a Perl script that parsed certain "wiki-like" hints into HTML (as well as breaking thembox files into separate HTML pages, linking them together, etc).
It was never perfect ... though we slowly refined the "hints" and
her code over the years. But it did make the job a couple of orders
of magnitude easier then hand-editing all of the mark-up into it
would have been.
I don't remember quite when the first wiki came put ... but I know
we were doing her work on "JEMH" (Jim's E-mail Mark-up Hints) before
I'd ever used a wiki and before I'd heard of the concept.
So, as you say, it isn't a wholly new idea. However I'm sure they're
being far more comprehensive than anything we ever even attempted.
Jim Dennis
(former Linux Gazette "Answer Guy")
Jim's E-mail Mark-up Hints
Posted Apr 10, 2007 20:24 UTC (Tue) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]
c2.com, the original wiki, has been around for a long time in computer terms, since 1995. http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiHistory
Of course, the idea of working with simplistic human-natural markup is probably much older, and relatively obvious, so I don't mean to ascribe the invention particularly to wikis, or this original wiki.
All I really meant to convey is that generating output from relatively simple structured input is not hard. Anyone with a bit of time can do it, and it's also possible to convert an existing system to handle slightly different input. That you can make your own is quite valuable, I think, and falls out of the simplicity of approach, which is one of the defining aspects of a lot of very tasteful designs. That is, you can achieve whatever you need without baroque difficult-to-read formats. Muse may be the bee's knees, but if you don't use emacs don't let it stop you.