Fun with Emacs, Part II
 I first wrote about Emacs right around Labor Day. I still intend to make it my main editor going forward, although I admit I haven't made much progress in using it day-to-day yet. I'm still reading heavily about it and Emacs Lisp in the excellent GNU documentation. No reason to change my opinion that it's the greatest software application ever written.
In the earlier entry, with quite a bit of bravado, I wrote this:
Another problem with Emacs today is the lame outliner. It's My Personal Pipe Dream to contribute some code to that module and make it much better. Had Emacs the capabilities of something like, say, Omni Outliner or Borland's sadly orphaned Framework IV, Emacs would leap to the head of the pack as a structured authoring tool.
That was ignorant of me. A lot of work has been been done on Emacs outlining already. On the help-gnu-emacs list, Stefan Bonnior pointed me to the Emacs CVS repository and his new work on outline-major-mode (outline.el), work which gives Emacs the ability to more easily promote and demote headings. Other, older packages (not usually part of the official Emacs distribution) tackle the same problem, or otherwise introduce outlining enhancements like auto-numbering, colorizing headings, etc.:
The Emacs Wiki has a section devoted to Emacs outlining packages.
I'll be checking all this out and keeping the blog informed. My goal is to use Emacs as a structured authoring tool, one suitable both for longish natural-language documents and for XML-based markup languages. Earlier I mentioned Paul Kinucan's XAE (XML Authoring Environment) package, which integrates Emacs and an enhanced PSGML mode with the Saxon XSLT processor and the DocBook DTD and Norm Walsh's DocBook XML style sheets.
Along those lines I've also learned about TEI-Emacs, from the Text Encoding Initiative. (How can one not love a site decorated with a early Renaissance woodcut of a scriptorium?) And, for a (relatively) simpler tool, Kai Großjohann on help-gnu-emacs list recommends Francois Pinard's xxml.el, an add-on to PSGM major-mode, for superior syntax highlighting of XML files.
8:25:49 PM 
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