Re: [O] Formal description of Org files

[Christopher Witte]

On 18 July 2011 01:14, Eric Schulte <address@hidden> wrote:

As I mentioned earlier in this thread, I think any formal _expression_
would be more useful if could be fed to existing parser-generation tools
to automatically write Org-mode parsers, or perhaps automatically
convert between Org-mode and other document formats.  I'm not sure
however to what degree that is just wishful thinking..

Perhaps Pandoc (http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/) would meet those requirements.  It uses a great parsing library with a syntax that greatly resembles a BNF grammar.  An output module is already written for org-mode, so writing an input module would allow us to convert from org-mode to any other of the existing Pandoc output formats (including "plain text, markdown, reStructuredText, HTML, LaTeX, ConTeXt, PDF, RTF, DocBook XML, OpenDocument XML, ODT, GNU Texinfo, MediaWiki markup, textile, groff man pages, Emacs org-mode, EPUB ebooks, and S5 and Slidy HTML slide shows").  I've been thinking of doing this for sometime now, as an exercise in learning Haskell, but realistically I just don't have the time.  does anyone else have the time?

Chris.