Hacker News Reader

Comment by s4vi0r | Hacker News Reader

Is there some way to tell org exactly how I want it to spit out HTML?

I was going to do my blog entirely with org-mode+org-publish, but it spits out a mess of HTML and also a small bit of js for some reason, so I'm just writing html directly myself now.

I don't really find writing html myself all that annoying or anything, but it'd be nice if I could get org to generate really clean/simple HTML for me that I could then write a small script to parse and wrap in divs I've defined for styling.

View on HN

I doubt there's anything actually wrong with the HTML that Org produces that would keep you from putting it in a blog, but you can certainly configure things to your liking. At the very least you can easily modify the HTML preamble and postamble, the javascript script tags and the CSS in style tags that Org's HTML export produces. All of those are just strings stored in variables that you can customize: org-html-preamble, org-html-postamble, org-html-scripts and org-html-style-default. There's more stuff you can configure by just reassigning some variable, see the file ox-html.el.

If tweaking those is not enough for you, you can write your own HTML export. You wouldn't have to parse Org syntax: you'd receive the Org markup already parsed into a nested list structure. If you don't use many Org features, writing an Org backend that supports only those probably isn't that much work. And you'd have ox-html.el to base your own backend on.

Are you kidding!? This is Emacs! You can tell it exactly how to do everything. Just advise/redefine the relevant functions. ;) The documentation of ox and publish does not cover everything, but when in doubt, just ask Emacs what code it runs when you do the thing you want to modify.

On my site (https://two-wrongs.com/) there is very little left of the original HTML. I'll see tomorrow if I can dig up the Lisp code I wrote for it.

You website design is awesome! Do you have the site source public? If allowed, I'd be interested in converting that to a theme for Hugo (https://gohugo.io), and possibly demoing that on how to use that with my package ox-hugo.

Custom css is supported for html export, from the docs at (https://orgmode.org/manual/CSS-support.html) --

The HTML export back-end includes a compact default style in each exported HTML file. To override the default style with another style, use these keywords in the Org file. They will replace the global defaults the HTML exporter uses.

#+HTML_HEAD: <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style1.css" /> #+HTML_HEAD_EXTRA: <link rel="alternate stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style2.css" />

To just turn off the default style, customize org-html-head-include-default-style variable, or use this option line in the Org file.

#+OPTIONS: html-style:nil

I've been looking for a similar solution - albeit not for HTML - but haven't found anything convincing so far. My train of thought was: It'd be great to have a a canonical XML format for org files to export to, since after that, you could essentially write XSLT transforms for almost any target format (even back to org-files to go full circle). In my case, that e.g. would be odt-files with branding for the organization I'm taking minutes for.

After a bit of googling, I also found an email[1] on the mailing list asking for more or less exactly that, but things don't seem to have gotten far.

I've been thinking about adapting the existing HTML export for such an XML format, but I really haven't had the time for it. :-/

[1]: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-orgmode/2009-08/msg...

Pandoc supports org-mode, so you should be able to use it to convert to DocBook, which you can then use with XLST (pandoc also supports HTML directly, by the way).

If I remember correctly, I had a look at the pandoc option, but got to the conclusion that this way, I would throw away useful 'syntactical' information (for example, I use todo-flags, tags and timestamps to track open tasks).

If you use org-mode without the need to extract such specific information (and are only interested in generating a document), pandoc might of course be a good way to go.

Edit: ...or maybe there even is a hack to identify and extract things like timestamps anyway. I didn't look into it that much.

I doubt XSLT is any easier to write than a new Org export backend, but that's probably a matter of personal preference.

Tooting my own horn, if you love living in Org mode, and are willing to try out Hugo (https://gohugo.io), I have an Org exporter package ox-hugo that exports to Markdown + required front-matter for Hugo. The package is even more magic if you choose to use a single Org file to export to multiple posts/pages.

Few examples:

1. ox-hugo documentation site from one file[1], source[2]

2. My blog[3]

3. ox-hugo test site (300+ test pages and counting)[4]

[1]: https://ox-hugo.scripter.co/ [2]: https://github.com/kaushalmodi/ox-hugo/raw/master/doc/ox-hug... [3]: https://scripter.co/ [4]: https://ox-hugo.scripter.co/test/

I've been blogging with org-publish for a while, but I switched to a Ruby script instead [1]. I'd not recommend using org-publish for this, because it's slow, and it's hard to add new posts. It's nice for static projects (say like a bunch of PDFs or some documentation maybe), but it does not lend itself to a more dynamic thing like a blog (dynamic in the sense that you want to add new pages rather frequently). Applying a custom HTML template is difficult, it means you need to either implement many org-export functions or use HTML_HEAD settings and a stylesheet to tame org's output. I say this as a happy everyday user of Org mode, both for word processing and any sort of notes, and my entire agenda and todo-lists and stuff.

The JS is for interacting with tables, if I'm not wrong.

[1] https://www.gkayaalp.com/blog/20180221_siteremake.html

I am assuming your site remake is still in progress? The fonts on your web site show up in super-huge size at the moment. You can see the font size on other sites like this one for comparison: [1].

[1]: https://i.imgur.com/um3yTdU.png

Thanks a lot! I haven't been able to reproduce that in any computers and browsers I have access to. Is that a Retina screen maybe?

I don't use Mac, so not sure what resolution qualifies as "Retina", but my Dell monitor resolution is 2560 x 1440.

There are, but I never explored them. I use Pelican, and although it doesn't support org files, it's easy to write a plugin to add your own formats. Behind the scene, I think I use pandoc to convert from org to rst, which Pelican does support.

Yes, this came up on /r/emacs recently, see[1] (you can control if you want the HTML preamble and/or postamble).

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/809xwx/how_to_get_pl...

For the most part, just styling what it does isn't that tough. Similarly, you can tell it to spit out raw html for some fun. http://taeric.github.io/cube-permutations-1.html shows some silliness I did recently that includes styling up portions of the page.

Do you want to do something much more complicated/simple than this?

Not exactly what you're asking for but I got great results with org-page[0]. It might be worth taking a look.

[0]: https://github.com/kelvinh/org-page

Not the ideal solution, but you can always use pandoc to convert org to html, or even markdown and configure the html generation from there.

Both html and markdown miss various org-specific features, like code fragments, drawers (imagine that one could want them to be able top open and close on click), task states, etc.

A general-purpose markup language like XML would be an ideal intermediate export format; XSLT can basically emit anything.

For drawers you could use https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/de... but yeah in general I agree

I know you can define CSS for how you want your export to look.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com