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: DocBook exporter code (version 1.0)
Date: Sun, 8 Mar 2009 08:22:08 +0100	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <52A4D4D6-E4BB-4ACF-9438-EB69E71ABEA8@uva.nl> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <byc4oy4tx9e.fsf@muchbodyking-lm.gateway.2wire.net>

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.

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.  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 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.

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.  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.

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.

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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