So I'm plugging at it, plugging along, plugging holes in my ignorance, plugging them with clumps of knowledge.
I've recently been fairly deeply into "The Org Manual", Release 9.4. I went through the whole thing, taking notes (in org-mode) on whatever looked useful and what did not look too impossibly confusing and deep and possibly never useful.
Yesterday I read that Richard Stallman once read "The Org Manual" and from it could not figure out what org-mode was, or how to use it, so I'm reassured. There is a lot to it, and it can get impossibly confusing.
It is easy to create a document consisting of notes with various heading levels, some quotes, some links, maybe a table or two, some code samples, and so on, and then to export that from org-mode to HTML. No probs.
What I'm currently trying to do is to find styling for that HTML.
Because org-mode for Emacs has been around since 2003, one would assume that there would be a host of themes and CSS files for styling the exported HTML. But nope. Unlike the usual rat's nest of interlocking, mutually-interdependent modes, modules, add-ons, and configuration files needed to get anything working in Emacs, styling HTML exported from org-mode is an almost empty category.
I have found a few resources, but all of them are clunky and will be inconvenient to use. I do have enough to work with though, enough to cover my needs, for the basics, but it will still be goofy going forward.
At least for now. The future, as always, will have to take care of itself.
I got started in this direction by one day discovering Sphinx. Sphinx was developed by and for the Python community to generate, convert, and display documentation in easily-readable formats.
At least for me though, for now though, Sphinx seems too involved. I'm using Emacs for most of my work, and if I can generate decently-styled HTML from the text files I create, I'm OK with that. Even if I have to keep things over toward the really simple end of the scale. I'm not sure that I need to do that, but maybe. And if I stick with Emacs, I don't need to add another tool set and learn all its quirks, foibles, and foolish dead ends.
I want to ease into this, and can add the whells and bissles later, when I know how to spell them and all such-like, and do Feel A Great Need.
And, oddly enough, the best CSS I've found so far is what has been taken from Sphinx and converted to be used with org-mode. Oddly enough, and strangely, given the age of Emacs (45 years) and org-mode (18 years).
But the Emacs world is not like that. The Emacs world is full of half-finished dream projects all piled up together in one tangled endless mass just daring you to come looking, lying in wait for the innocent, steaming with promises, choked with nippers and stingers and sticky webs. Some people get things working and others don't. I'm mostly in the second category. Getting too deeply into Emacs eventually means that you will devote 100% of your time to it, and that you can never again return to the surface.
So anyway.
A couple of weeks back I was seriously wondering if I should devote any time at all to continuing with org-mode and HTML and styling at all, and found in my saved files a copy of "Org Mode Is One of the Most Reasonable Markup Languages to Use for Text" by Karl Voit, and changed my mind. I'll stick with org-mode for now.
Voit compares org-mode to Mmarkdown, reStructuredText, AsciiDoc, Wikitext, and some others, like Markdown Extra, MultiMarkdown, GitHub Flavored Markdown, and CommonMark.
He concludes that org-mode
- is intuitive, easy to learn and remember
- is standardized
- is consistent
- can be easily typed
- makes sense outside of Emacs
- has excellent tool support (within Emacs)
That is, he concludes (in case you came in late), that org-mode is the all-around bestest.
Maybe, maybe not, but since I already use Emacs daily and already use org-mode daily, and can simply and quickly export HTML, and that I think that I have found a not-terrible way to style the HTML that I export from org-mode in a not-terrible-looking way, I'm pretty well set for the present.
So I'll check out Sphinx in a week or two just so I know what it is, and then I'll get on to re-learning the rest of what I want to re-learn, if I can remember what the hell that was.
Refs:
The Org Manual
Richard Stallman
Org-mode
Emacs
Sphinx
Python
Org Mode Is One of the Most Reasonable Markup Languages to Use for Text
Have anything to add? Then email sosayseff+snorp@gmail.com
Me? Frantically trying to get my nose hairs under control. Yet again.