Learning GNU Emacs, 3rd Edition

Chapter 8. Markup Language Support

It's true that many of the people who use Emacs are developers, writing code, tweaking it, recompiling it, and just generally enjoying the services of an amazingly extensible work environment. A variety of people, including developers, need to produce text for publication, whether internally, online, or in book format. This chapter describes the markup language support that Emacs offers, a topic relevant to both information publishers and developers, as more and more development work uses variants of the Extensible Markup Language, XML.

Choosing a format for producing documents isn't all that straightforward these days, especially if you eschew Microsoft Word. Some people write HTML, and Emacs offers a few options for this. HTML gives you some control over formatting but displays differently on various browsers. Of course, it is important as the lingua franca of the Web.

Other text publishing options include the TEX family. TEX (pronounced "tek") is a formatter that was developed by Donald Knuth for generating books. LATEX (pronounced "lay-tek") is a set of TEX commands created by Leslie Lamport. With TEX and LATEX , you can produce very precisely formatted text with equations, interesting fonts, graphics, headers and footers, and the like. Whether using filters or features of the program itself, you can publish TEX documents in a variety of formats.

Another option for publishing text—as well as programming—is XML. XML, when combined ...