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I am pleased to announce the release of Emacs Muse 3.12.

Emacs Muse is an authoring and publishing environment for Emacs. It simplifies the process of writing documents and publishing them to various output formats. One of the principal aims in the development of Muse is to make it very easy to produce good-looking, standards-compliant documents.

Release info

Tarball

http://download.gna.org/muse-el/muse-3.12.tar.gz

Zip file

http://download.gna.org/muse-el/muse-3.12.zip

Commit ID

617fa8c5d1ed92e8b2eff4d6d2b53e608440db20

Instructions follow for those who track the source code using git. If you wish to track the development of Emacs Muse, visit <http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/MuseDevelopment> for instructions.

This release has the signed git tag "v3.12". The tag points at a commit object with the Commit ID mentioned above. To verify the tag, do:

git fetch origin
git tag -v v3.12

To check out the release, do:

git checkout v3.12

To switch back to the master branch, do:

git checkout master

Future Plans

The following are some thoughts that I have concerning functionality that might potentially make it into a future release of Muse.

• We need to make it easier for new users to get up to speed on Muse. One means for doing this is to automatically load the file which contains a publishing style if the style is used at publish time. This way, people do not need to remember to add a `require' statement for every publishing style that they want to use.

  I would like to solve this by implementing a sort of modules system, perhaps one similar to the erc-modules interface for ERC. It would also be nice to separate the concepts of "loading" a source file from that of "instantiating" a module. Some Planner modules already do this by requiring an extra function to be run to "enable" its functionality.

  This is particularly needed in the case of the muse-wiki.el file, which depends on the now-frowned-upon eval-after-load feature. In order to provide the publishing and coloring parts of the muse-wiki module when needed, it might be necessary to create modules for muse-publish.el and muse-colors.el, so that the concept of modules does not apply only to publishing styles. The module could automatically define some hooks that should be called after it has been loaded. These hooks can either be manually added-to by modules, or the module definition could contain a list of "conditional dependencies" on other modules, with code attached. The method for defining Muse modules should take keyword arguments, in order to make these definitions easier to read and easier to hack.

  There is also the need to distinguish between several types of modules. When customizing a new option like `muse-modules', people may want to see a visual difference between, say, publishing styles (example: muse-latex.el), files which provide functionality (example: muse-publish.el), and files which supplement a publishing style in some way (example: muse-latex2png.el).

• I want to prioritize the support for muse-project.el and extend it to support calling external programs that can publish files that are in Markdown and reStructuredText form. A minor mode could be made which adds publishing functionality (namely: C-c C-v, C-c C-p, and C-c C-t) to the existing modes for displaying files in these formats.

Once these two features are implemented, I think that it might be time to start thinking about getting Muse included with Emacs.

News Items

The NEWS items for this release are available here.