Re: Re: DocBook exporter code (version 1.0)

From: Carsten Dominik <dominik@science.uva.nl>
To: Baoqiu Cui <cbaoqiu@yahoo.com>
Cc: emacs-orgmode@gnu.org
Subject: Re: Re: DocBook exporter code (version 1.0)
Date: Mon, 9 Mar 2009 07:25:23 +0100	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <4FB2840A-1678-4259-8FF9-BD2F61B03755@uva.nl> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <byc63ijb8wt.fsf@muchbodyking-lm.gateway.2wire.net>

Hi Baoqui,

thank you very much for creating this exporter, and for contributing
it to Org.

Do you have a copyright assignment with the FSF that would cover Org- 
mode?
If not, would you be willing to sign one?  This will give us the freedom
to add the file to Emacs at some point.

Another small issue:  Any files that go into Emacs must,
in order to be consistent with the old 8+3 DOS file names,
be unique names within the first 8 characters.  Even though
I like org-export-docbook as a name, I think we need to call it
org-docbook.el.  At least that gives you the option to do
more things with docbook besides export, should you want to.

Maybe we should rename org-export-latex to org-latex, for consistency,
but this is hard after such a long time.

- Carsten

On Mar 9, 2009, at 5:46 AM, Baoqiu Cui wrote:

> Hi Carsten,
>
> Carsten Dominik <dominik@science.uva.nl> writes:
>
>> Hi Baoqui,
>>
>> thanks for the link to the code.
>>
>> Forgive me for so far staying quiet on this subject.  When you
>> first posted the announcement, I had some mixed feelings.
>
> No problem at all.  This is totally understandable.
>
>> First of all, I don't really know docbook, and I have never used it.
>>
>> Then:
>>
>> One of the really weak features in Org's design is that exporting  
>> is not
>> implemented in a generic way.  All exporters share a preprocessing  
>> step
>> that turns Org format into something a little more sane and  
>> consistent.
>> Then each exporter goes its own way.  This setup makes maintenance
>> sort of a nightmare, because each change to Org syntax needs to be
>> implemented in all exporters separately.  ...
>
> Yes, it would be nice to have a generic exporting framework in Org.
> When I just started working on the DocBook exporter, I tried to follow
> org-export-latex.el first but hit some limitation in org-list-to- 
> generic
> after a short time.  Then I switched to the style of org-export-as- 
> html,
> and found its line-based exporting very easy to use.
>
>> ... Maybe you have read my
>> swearing when I was trying to fix the LaTeX exporter which I did
>> not understand completely at first - it was written by Bastien.
>
> I haven't read about this, but I can imagine what kind of difficulty  
> you
> might have...
>
>> I had really hoped that the next step in exporting Org would be
>> to rewrite the exporter from scratch, in a generic way, that will
>> then make supporting different formatters more stable and easy.
>> Adding a new exporter does not get us closer to that idea.
>
> Agreed.  If Org documents can be parsed into tree representations by  
> the
> generic exporter, and each individual exporter only needs to configure
> the tags (or formatting methods) for all components in the tree,  
> writing
> different exporters would be much easier.  Not sure if this can be
> easily done in Org.
>
>> And I had feared that your exporter would be a badly hacked
>> attempt reinventing lots of wheels, that could never become a really
>> complete export.
>>
>> I have misjudged severely, the exporter you made looks quite  
>> complete,
>> you have based it very heavily on the XHTML exporter and in this way
>> it seems to be able to handle the entire Org syntax, if I see
>> correctly.  ...
>
> Yes, DocBook exporter is heavily based on the XHTML exporter.  Both
> exporters shares a lot of processing, but differ at other areas.  Some
> internal functions used by these two exporters could be merged in the
> future.
>
>> ... So I have now made the changes you require in org-exp.el,
>> and I would like to include the exporter, once you are satisfied,
>> into our contrib directory or even, depending on copyright  
>> assignment,
>> into the core.
>
> Thanks a lot for making the changes in org-exp.el!  I've removed the
> modified version of org-exp.el from my repository on Google Code.   
> I'll
> try to do more testing (including testing it on XEmacs) and  
> incorporate
> any comments that other people may have before you can put this  
> exporter
> into Org release.
>
>> However, I need to make clear that I have no time to maintain another
>> exporter, so I would hope that you would be willing to to the  
>> necessary
>> work to keep it up to date and working.
>
> I won't have any problem with maintaining this exporter.
>
> Thanks,
> Baoqiu
>
>
>> Best wishes
>>
>> - Carsten
>>
>> On Mar 8, 2009, at 6:10 AM, Baoqiu Cui wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I just posted the code for DocBook exporter to Google Code.  You can
>>> use
>>> the following link to get access to the code and example files:
>>>
>>> http://code.google.com/p/bcui-emacs/source/browse/#svn/trunk/org-
>>> docbook
>>>
>>> Here is the README:
>>> = =
>>> = 
>>> = 
>>> ====================================================================
>>> #
>>> # File: org-docbook/README
>>> #
>>> # $Id$
>>> #
>>>
>>> This is the DocBook exporter for Org-mode, a tool written in Emacs
>>> Lisp
>>> to export text files written in Org-mode to DocBook.
>>>
>>> This directory contains:
>>>
>>> README
>>>   This file.
>>>
>>> org-export-docbook.el
>>>   The main part of DocBook exporter code.
>>>
>>> org-exp.el
>>>   Slightly modified version of file org-exp.el that is part of
>>>   Org-mode.  Currently this file is synced up with Org-mode 6.24.
>>>
>>> test.org
>>>   An Org file used for testing.  It includes all the features that
>>>   current version of DocBook exporter supports.
>>>
>>> test.xml
>>>   DocBook XML file exported from test.org.
>>>
>>> test.pdf
>>>   PDF file generated from DocBook XML file test.xml.
>>>
>>> If you have any comments on how to improve this exporter, please  
>>> send
>>> email to cbaoqiu AT yahoo DOT com.
>>>
>>> = =
>>> = 
>>> = 
>>> ====================================================================
>>>
>>> You are welcome to try this out, and give me any comments you may
>>> have.
>>> Bug reports and ideas on how to improve this will be highly
>>> appreciated.
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> Baoqiu
>
>
>
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