Re: [emacs-wiki-discuss] Re: muse comments?

[Tibor Simko]

On Sun, 20 Jun 2004, John Wiegley wrote:
> I'm glad to catch these before inserting into Emacs.  Any others?

I've tried ``muse.tar.gz'' from your site.  Good stuff!  I especially
like the book publishing feature, thanks to which I'm now migrating my
emacs-wiki projects to Muse.

Here are some problems I noticed:

1. It may be good to make Muse Emacs-21.3-compatible, to increase the
   user base.  The errors I got with Emacs 21.3.1:

      cgi.el:
        ** The function `int-char' is not known to be defined.
      httpd.el:
        ** The following functions are not known to be defined:
          parse-time-string, time-less-p, open-network-stream-server
      muse-docbook.el:
        ** The function `replace-in-string' is not known to be defined.
      muse-html.el:
        ** The function `looking-back' is not known to be defined.
      muse-mode.el:
        ** The function `event-window' is not known to be defined.
      muse-project.el:
        ** reference to free variable save-some-buffers-action-alist
      muse.el:
        ** The function `pp-to-string' is not known to be defined.
      
2. When the source file is UTF-8, HTML publishing leads to an error:

      Debugger entered--Lisp error: (wrong-type-argument listp "utf-8")
      muse-html-transform-content-type(utf-8-unix)
      muse-html-encoding()
      muse-html-prepare-buffer()
      apply(muse-html-prepare-buffer nil)
      [...]
    
   (Emacs-wiki works fine in this respect.)

3. If the verse environment is triggered by '>', then empty space
   after leading '>' isn't respected.  Try this input:

      > Foo
      > Foo
      > Foo
      > 
      > Bar
      > Bar
      > Bar

   Muse prints one verse paragraph for Foo's, then `>', then another
   verse paragraph for Bars.  If the verse environment is triggered by
   ``<verse>...</verse>'', then Muse works as expected.

   (Emacs-wiki works fine for the former case too.)

4. You cannot use centered asterisks to typographically delimit blocks
   of text.  Type ``* * *'' and press M-s.  Compare to typing ``o o o'' 
   and pressing M-s.

   (Emacs-wiki works fine for asterisks too.)

5. I played with ``M-x muse-book-publish-project'' and found problems
   like:

      a) Required packages aren't declared all the time for all
         publishing styles.  For example, ``muse-book-latex-header''
         definition should include ``\\usepackage{hyperref}'' because
         of \href's that are almost surely to be encountered later.
      
      b) There are undefined commands like ``\beforepoemtitleskip''
         and friends, that are apparently missing from the tarball.  
         I guess they are present in your private area inside
         ``Documents/site/poem-header.tex'' or somewhere, but the
         tarball users cannot see them.
 
      c) Special chars should be taken care of for LaTeX output.  For
         example, if you have URLs in free text with underscores, like
         ``http://foo.com/bar_baz.html'', you get a problem with `_'
         having special signification in the TeX context.  (Inside
         ``<example>...</example>'' the verbatim makes it work fine.)

Here are some questions:

Q. What are your plans with respect to the sitemap generation and
   structural navigation, aka page category hierarchies?  With
   emacs-wiki I'm producing the navigation breadcrumb trail in a kind
   of `copy and paste' approach at the moment, but I wanted to hack
   something up when the time permits.  See the recent discussion at
   <http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-wiki-discuss/2004-05/msg00049.html>.

Q. What about introducing a simple `text' publishing style?  It could
   be handy for sending pages by email, for example.  By the text
   publishing style I mean simple source transformations like
   replacing ``<example>...</example>'' with an indented box, etc.

Q. Any comments on where Muse is heading with respect to BHL, for
   example?