Re: org the program vs. org the format

[Daniele Pizzolli <dan@toel.it>]

Hello Thomas,

Thomas Koch writes:

> Hi,
>
> there's a discussion on emacs-devel[1] about replacing texinfo as the 
> documentation format and org is mentioned. RMS correctly mentions that org-
> mode is not a format but a program.
>
> This was also my problem when I thought about using org-mode at work in my 
> team. Since I'm the only emacs user we decided to use asciidoc which is a 
> format that can be edited and processed with different programs.
>
> So org-mode is a bit like PHP which also doesn't (didn't) have a specification 
> but the implementation is the specification.
>
> Would it be possible to change the format of org-mode to be a superset of e.g. 
> asciidoc or markdown but keep the features?

Sorry for not answering directly but I am not enough knowledgeable.

I like to point out that there is an ongoing attempt to specify the org
syntax[1], and that there are translators[2] and tools[3] that can work
with org source files.

My personal workaround (but I am not sure it can scale for a community)
is to have emacs and all the org dependencies packaged in a lightweight
virtual machine.  A set of script take care to send the org files to the
vm and retrieve the results.  Unfortunately my approach is quite rough,
and I am not aware of any recent attempt to offer org-mode as a
service[4].  If you have some degree of control of your build/continuous
integration server I guess this is a viable solution.

My use case is to have a clean environment where build a reproducible doc
using babel, IMHO not so farm from using org for creating documentation.

Like you I also have problem in sharing the result and the work, because
of the high step for newcomers that do know little about emacs, command
line and scripting.  I think that we have some good examples for solving
this, see for example the ipython notebook[5] and rmarkdown[6], both
projects month after month gain more and more adoption.  The great power
of org is still winning for me, but I keep an eye on other approaches.

Best,
Daniele

[1] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-orgmode/2014-09/msg00599.html
[2] http://orgmode.org/worg/org-translators.html
[3] http://orgmode.org/worg/org-tools/index.html
[4] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-orgmode/2012-03/msg01097.html
[5] http://ipython.org/notebook.html
[6] http://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/