Re: org-mode markup vs rst for general content

[John Kitchin <jkitchin@andrew.cmu.edu>]

Over the past few years I have looked at pandoc a few times:

http://kitchingroup.cheme.cmu.edu/blog/2014/07/17/Pandoc-does-org-mode-now/
http://kitchingroup.cheme.cmu.edu/blog/2015/01/29/Export-org-mode-to-docx-with-citations-via-pandoc/
http://kitchingroup.cheme.cmu.edu/blog/2015/06/11/ox-pandoc-org-mode-+-org-ref-to-docx-with-bibliographies/

Of the exports, to Word is still the least well developed (in my opinion
of course).

Sometimes I just use ox-clip to copy org-mode into word with formatting.
It works pretty well for simple things.

I started https://github.com/jkitchin/scimax/blob/master/ox-rtf.el s an
alternative path to word. It works kind of minimally, but it does not do
everything, and I have not worked on it in a while.

You might see the first three entries of
http://kitchingroup.cheme.cmu.edu/blog/2014/08/08/What-we-are-using-org-mode-for/
which talk about the blog, two large "books" I wrote in org-mode, and a
few of the scientific papers we have written in org-mode and converted
to Latex then pdf (there are over 15 now I think).

A long time ago I was enamored by rst, and Sphinx documentation in
Python. These days I vastly prefer the simpler, and more functional
org-mode markup. The functionality (links, executable code, flexible
export, etc) could be made to work in rst too (it is emacs after all),
but I find it easier to do it and extend it in org-mode (but that is
mostly my experience with org-mode speaking). I like keeping it all in
emacs, and not switching over to a browser to get access to
documentation. That is certainly a preference of mine, but one that is
so strong I wrote an emacs pydoc module to show python docstrings in
emacs, and started writing those in org-mode so I could have equations,
figures and links in them ;)

I think about org-documents in a fundamentally different way than I
think about Latex/rst/html. My org-documents are simultaneously
narrative functional text and documents that contain human readable,
machine-addressable information, e.g. contacts, bibtex entries,
meetings, etc. that I can use in other documents or applications, while
retaining the capability to export the documents to other formats that
are considerably more limited, but that a publisher might demand.


Uwe Brauer writes:

>    > On 10/03/17 09:03, Saša Janiška wrote:
>
>    > The only problem that I have had is converting org-mode to Word files
>    > as required by my publisher. The ODT export module is fiddly and often
>    > chokes on my longer documents. When it does choke, it is hard to trace
>    > the problems. Markdown + Pandoc seems much better in this regard, but
>    > the outlining features in Emacs do not seem to be as good for the
>    > Markdown mode. To get a decent export in my latest manuscript I had to
>    > export to LaTeX then use ht4tex. Not a pretty workflow.
>
> I had good experience with pandoc exporting from org mode to docx, but
> maybe your documents are more complex.
>
> Uwe Brauer


--
Professor John Kitchin
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Department of Chemical Engineering
Carnegie Mellon University
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@johnkitchin
http://kitchingroup.cheme.cmu.edu