es0mhi

@david_megginson

This opposition of org-mode vs. (LaTeX, SGML) XML in publishing is something that resonates very strongly with me - though I'm afraid it's hard for many org users to understand.

I do almost all of my daily work in org-mode, but whenever I start a writing project that needs to be published, I use XML. There are all kinds of reasons for this, some very specific to my case of academic writing, where the handling of citations, footnotes and bibliography can get very complex and specific. But I feel that in the end it comes down to something much simpler.

For decades I have been using docbook-xml for all my writing projects, starting with drafting in asciidoc (and this co-existence of asciidoc and org-mode as two "markdown" dialects still leaves me unsatisfied). The deeper reasons however seem to be that in org-mode you start designing your text from an outline. For me, this is the wrong approach, as I need to write a text as a stream-of-consciousness, adding paragraph after paragraph, and only later get to an outline. The way I'm used to using org-mode seems to make this impossible for me.

#emacs #orgmode #docbook #asciidoc

Nov 1, 2024 at 10:23pmWeb
Show threadLdBethNov 2, 2024

@es0mhi @david_megginson Besides plain TeX, I also use DocBook XML with xslTNG stylesheets, and ndw who made these stylesheets is also editor of DocBook spec, had made an emacs library to dump XML representation of org-mode document, which might be interests to you https://github.com/ndw/org-to-xml

#XSLT #xslt3 #docbook

GitHub - ndw/org-to-xml: Library to convert Emacs org-mode files to XML

Library to convert Emacs org-mode files to XML. Contribute to ndw/org-to-xml development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub
Show threadMichael Jaeger 🇺🇦Nov 2, 2024

@es0mhi

@david_megginson

It's interesting that AsciiDoc is often perceived as a #Markdown dialect although the initial release of the latter is 2 years younger the the initial release of AsciiDoc (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown and https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/AsciiDoc)

#emacs #orgmode #docbook #asciidoc

Markdown - Wikipedia

Show threadSacha ChuaNov 4, 2024
@es0mhi @david_megginson I often do reverse outlines in Org Mode. I start by writing text, shuffling lines around with M-S-up/down and paragraphs with M-up/down. If I'm losing track of what I want to say and how everything fits together, I put the paragraphs under headings (M-RET to create a heading at point) or list items so that I can collapse everything and think about it more structurally. I might leave the headings in when I publish them or take them back out again. On a larger scale, I've been slowly working on organizing my blog posts into outlines (https://sachachua.com/topic/). So it's possible to do bottom-up writing however which way you want. =)
Index :: Sacha Chua