Page:Sacha Chua - Emacs Chat with Carsten Dominik.djvu/4

 the exporter.

Sacha: Yes.

Carsten: It's a complete revamp. I don't know how up to date you are about this discussion. But the entire set of exporters which go out to HTML, and to LaTeX, and to ASCII, and to what have you, are being totally revamped with a basic parser design.

Sacha: Yes.

Carsten: There's actually also an interesting story behind it, because when we started this Org Mode, I remember that quite early I got in touch with John Wiegley, the famous John Wiegley that everybody is talking about. He actually at the time offered to use Muse as the backend for doing the exporting.

At the time, I was thinking about this, but on the other hand, I had Bastien Guerry moving in, and he was writing a LaTeX exporter. So, I didn't really want to sort of throw out all his code. In the end, I didn't really make a decision, and that meant that we weren't going the Muse way.

I think now, after ten years – I think that's 10 years ago or so – this has paid off, because I think now the parser model which has been implemented in Org Mode by Nicolas Goaziou is actually a better and more abstract way to go than even the Muse exporter was. I think in this sense in the end, this was a good decision. But it has taken a long time. You have to admit: we had all these exporters. I think we had five or six different backends. And each exporter has had its own parser.

Sacha: I know.

Carsten: And so that means if somebody in the code was changing or if somebody had a little bug or so, then we had to change this in five different places in five different ways. So they were never quite compatible, and things like this. This is all about to change now. I'm really excited about this. Bastien, Nicolas, and all the people who have been working on this right now… I'm looking forward to this when this will be finally rolled out in release 8.0. I think it's coming out in a few days.

Sacha: I'm very excited about that, too. The export functionality is one of the things that Avdi was talking about in terms of technical authoring. It is