Re: On being web-friendly and why info must die

[Steinar Bang]

>>>>> Richard Stallman <address@hidden>:

> I once looked at the documentation for Org mode, and gave up.  It presented
> doing things I didn't find useful.  I did not see, at the beginning, how
> to use it as markup for manuals.  Perhaps it says that later, but I did not
> get that far.

The documentation for Org doesn't AFAIK explicitly say how to markup a
document for manuals.

But conceptually it is fairly simple: think outline-mode on steroids
(ie. with added primitives for emphasis, hyperlinks, cross reference and
other thing.  It has quite extensive facilities for editing code
examples, because it can use emacs' mode for the language of the example
and also render exported code example with emacs' formatting/colouring
of that language)

And any sub-tree of of an Org document can be exported in a variety of
formats.

> * It is a program.  What we need is a format.

Well... in addition to being an emacs major mode, Org _is_ a format,
supported by at least 4 other programs I can think of offhand (2 vim
modes, and mobile-org for Android and iOS).

> * The program runs only in Emacs.

Even if that was true, why should that be a handicap for writing
documentation for emacs...?

On a side note: As another poster on this thread mentioned, org-mode has
made people use emacs, that otherwise wouldn't have used emacs (they use
emacs to be able to use org-mode as their notebook, timetracker,
organizer etc.).