Markup formats

Written on 002019-07-28T19:48Z by baltakatei

Wikitext

Since I use emacs as my editor I thought I'd see if there was a set of emacs tools designed to facilitate editing wikitext (what you edit when you click the "edit source" tab on the top of any Wikipedia article).

One tool I wish that existed is the ability to automatically format default in-line references into a format more visible for human eyes. Here is an example from the wikitext for the Kyoto Animation arson attack article:

<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20190727_02/|title=Nearly 6 million dollars donated after Kyoto blaze {{!}} NHK WORLD-JAPAN News|website=NHK WORLD|language=en|access-date=2019-07-27}}</ref>

I want a tool that can convert that text into this:

<ref>{{Cite web
|url          = https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20190727_02/
|title        = Nearly 6 million dollars donated after Kyoto blaze {{!}} NHK WORLD-JAPAN News
|website      = NHK WORLD
|language     = en
|access-date  = 2019-07-27
}}</ref>

I have been reading up on how the Emacs Lisp language works so I can write my own custom function to perform this formatting automatically on a region of text I select in emacs (I prefer to edit article source in emacs since I really like the keyboard shortcuts). I'm currently learning the basics.

LaTeX

I also had some curiosity about possibly using emacs for composing documents using the LaTeX markdup language. I imagine that would be useful for producing documents for explaining mathematical concepts in general.

This blog post located at dated 2010-05-13, and titled Emacs as the Ultimate LaTeX Editor seems promising. It recommends the use of the AUCTeX package available in the debian repository (wikipedia page). It had a followup post which explained how LaTeX equation previous could be seen within the emacs GUI editor.

Markdown

I also decided I'd try and write this page using Markdown and the M-x markdown-preview function (which converts the markdown markup into an HTML file which it has my browser open).

I figured out I can use the markdown package to convert markdown files into HTML via:

$ markdown mytestfile.md > mytestfile.html

It looks better than raw text files, in any case. Maybe one day I'll get fancy and use texinfo or something from which I can auto-generate a static HTML website. For now, though, I'll focus on getting stuff written.

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