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>On the writing side, the main issue is that literate programming tends to tie your writing into the tools that support your literate programming. This can make
by antt 8y ago
>On the writing side, the main issue is that literate programming tends to tie your writing into the tools that support your literate programming. This can make collaboration on a document difficult if the people you’re collaborating with are not as sold on the tools as you are. The moment you need to work with a business person who prefers to use Google Docs to share a document, or a university department that insists on receiving drafts as Microsoft Word documents, you start to face the pain of exporting to those proprietary formats. Like many issues in software development, this is really a social issue: for literate programming to work, all of the writers need to agree on the tools being used.
I've used org-mode at work and this was actually the strongest selling point. Using pandoc and massaging the org-mode reader to map better onto the pandoc markdown ast I could export to pdf, html and docx (!!!). I had production code + prose sent to the CTO as a word attachment in an email and she loved it.
The tangle comments also meant I have a workflow to share the code as regular code with the rest of the team and use git to see which code sections they changed. There wasn't enough traffic to justify writing an un-tangler that put their code back into the original document but it seems like a very interesting problem.
- swiley 8y agoIt’s strange how few people use pandoc for word processing. Even if your goal is just to produce a docx file in the end it’s so much more pleasant to write it in markdown in a distraction free editor you’re comfortable with than to deal with word or writer.
- antt 8y agoWith the latest versions of pandoc and org-mode I find I write nearly exclusively org-files which are then converted to other file types without any pain. I don't think I've even had to write raw documents LaTeX in the last year, other than using TikZ for graphics. Emacs+evil+org+pandoc is the Swiss army chainsaw of text manipulation.
- chrissoundz 8y agoAlong the same lines, I've used Pandoc to convert a org-mode file into a revealjs presentation.
- lionyo 8y agoI've been using revealjs too! I've been using this: https://github.com/yjwen/org-reveal https://github.com/yjwen/org-reveal
- Vekz 8y agoFrom my experience this is just unfortunate lack of awareness that Pandoc exists.
- BeetleB 8y agoYou can export to all these formats, but what if they edit the DOC file and send it back to you? How do you bring those changes back to org? Will pandoc preserve your converted org mode file structure?
- gkya 8y agoOrg mode can natively export to all that formats, and more. The end result is always better than pandoc's, and it lends itself better to the customisation of the process and hooking in your own functions to further modify it.