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Comment by setr | Hacker News Reader

>org-mode is standardized

Last I looked into it (mainly with interest for vim), few if any parsers/tooling exist for it outside of emacs; as I recall, people claimed that it apparently has sufficient (undocumented/poorly specified) quirks in the emacs implementation that 100% reproduction is difficult; similar to implementing vim-mode for editor plugins

In which case, its only as standardized as the one implementation; which is exactly how standardized markdown started with (the perl implementation)

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Came here just to say that. I had a static blog written in org-mode and converted it over to markdown a couple of weeks ago because there's no good way of converting org-mode to html except by running emacs. So for each article, getting a html representation requires firing up emacs. That's insane.

If there were good (and fast!) js, c, python, etc libraries to fully support parsing org-mode to AST and HTML, only then would it be a viable solution for markup.

Emacs can run as an elisp interpreter, check out the '--script' switch. This makes it possible to run org-export without starting an emacs session.

I was just about to say. The GP sounds like they're saying

> there's no good way of converting <markup language> to html except by running <preferred converter>. So for each article, getting a html representation requires firing up <preferred converter>. That's insane.

And how do I use that when I want to interactively convert org-mode to html in javascript? Like countless pure-javascript markdown libraries allow me to do? not to mention the security hazards of running emacs with any user input from a website.

That you don't – much like you don't get Pandoc Markdown in JavaScript, because Pandoc is not written in JS.

But if you are content with a less featured variation of the markup language (but still more featureful than Markdown), you can get that for JavaScript too: https://xiaoxinghu.github.io/orgajs/syntax

And how do I use that when I want to interactively convert org-mode to html in javascript? Like countless pure-javascript markdown libraries allow me to do?

not to mention the security hazards of running emacs with any user input from a website.

OK, but you just switched use cases from a "static blog" to interactive web page with untrusted inputs.

First, pandoc does a pretty decent job of converting Org Mode to HTML or several other formats.

Second, "firing" up Emacs sounds odd to Org Mode's target audience. :) We already have Emacs open! (I typed this comment in Emacs).

I don't know how hard it is to make a nice looking website in Org Mode, but to make bland websites for academics (like this schmuck's page: https://www.matem.unam.mx/~omar/), I think Org Mode and org-publish are great. And probably it's not harder to make a nice website with org-publish than with anything else: the trick is being willing to learn CSS. :)

Pandoc makes me extremely happy. My consultant wanted a .doc file the other day: `pandoc -f org -t support_brief.org -o support_brief.docx`

Of course the canonical format for pandoc is markdown.

To be specific, the canonical format for Pandoc is Pandoc Markdown, which is still my favorite flavor of Markdown (I guess Github-falvored is my second favorite). But Org Mode is even nicer than Pandoc Markdown, so I used Pandoc to convert all my files to Org Mode.

And Hakyll is a static site generator based on Pandoc, letting you leave your site source in whichever markup you choose.

If you're turning markup formatted files into html there is pandoc (https://pandoc.org/) for that

Kulfon [1] is a static site generator that compiles Org Mode to HTML without using Emacs. You can just drop `.org` files in a directory and run a one-command tool to make this work. I use it for my website, mostly to write blog posts. It is also possible to mix Markdown and Org Mode files in a single project/directory.

Kulfon is my own project, so take it with a grain of salt. I've decided to focus on Org Mode as I also believe this format doesn't get the recognition it deserves. It doesn't mean Markdown is bad, au contraire, it is almost perfect. In Org Mode, for instance, I still cannot get used to the source code blocks. It is, however, good to have a choice.

The Org Mode support in Kulfon is not perfect yet, but good enough for most situations. It is based on a JavaScript plugin by Xiaoxing Hu called orgajs [2]. You can use it directly in your project.

One of the motivations for building a SSG with Org Mode was Org Brain [3]. I have a plenty of interconnected notes that I would like to publish on my website « as-is ». This would be rather difficult to do using Markdown format.

[1]: https://kulfon.org/ [2]: https://github.com/xiaoxinghu/orgajs [3]: https://github.com/Kungsgeten/org-brain

That's a fair point. My own blog runs a two-step process: I export org-mode posts to HTML with Emacs/Org-Mode exporter, and then rewrite the result in my static generator.

Do you have a public repo for your blog? I couldn't find anything on GitHub.

Nah, the generator is so full of garbage code that I keep it as a private repo. The generator handles both new posts (org-exported to HTML) and old posts (Wordpress exports I dumped to org mode).

A partial snippet of the code that handles new posts:

https://gist.github.com/TeMPOraL/c401f12d50d4e1d4f94492e3d0f...

What's happening is that I take the HTML generated by Emacs Org Mode exporter, deserialize it to DOM, select a block corresponding to contents (to cut out superfluous stuff I don't need), and then run a bunch of tree-walkers that massages the DOM until it becomes something I can wrap with my site's scaffolding and dump into a file. It's really ugly, but gets the job done.

That eight megs of memory is a pretty terrible price.

8MB fits in L3 cache these days.

Did pandoc not convert org files to HTML correctly?

Pandoc only handles a subset of org-mode markup.

IIRC last time I tried this (long ago) there were a number of gaps in things like org-mode tables.

At the limiting case, the (common or uncommon) elisp extensions (e.g. org-babel) will likely never be processed by third-party tools.

If you put the results of org-babel into the buffer, then pandoc handles everything OK.

The one problem I have with pandoc is that when using word export, it loses the table and figure numbers. Mind you, at least I only have to put those in outside emacs :)

> Pandoc only handles a subset of org-mode markup.

To me that's got the same drawbacks as "not standardized". If not all of the existing tools support the standard then there are several de facto standards.

Yeah. I use markdown hosted file and do the markdown -> html conversion entirely clientside via http://dynalon.github.io/mdwiki/#!index.md. I don't think it's possible to do that at all with orgmode?

I use Pelican for my static blog, and it takes both markdown and rst. I've automated the process: I convert org to rst using pandoc, and let Pelican take it from there. I literally made a Pelican plugin to do it - so my content directory now just has org files.

So far, I've not seen any major issues.

What’s wrong with pandoc? I use org-mode but only export with pandoc because it works better.

Can confirm. I tried several libs in several languages to parse org there are always weird results.

Maybe Ruby's implementation is best for now since github is using it.

Github's Ruby implementation of org-mode syntax has quite a few holes in it, as shown by this test page: https://github.com/novoid/github-orgmode-tests

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