What is Muse ?

Muse is an emacs mode initially created by John Wiegley. It is an authoring system that uses a simple wiki-like syntax and allows publishing to various backends: HTML, Latex, Groff, Bloxsom, RSS, PDF... Moreover, it offers powerful editing features thanks to its integration with emacs such as link insertion and navigation from a wide variety of sources (mail, news, bbdb, bibtex files, other muse files, internet URIs...).

Muse has a companion project Planner. Planner uses Muse as its publishing system and markup syntax and is a wonderful tool for personal and professional information handling and task management.

We refer the reader to the given sites for more information and complete documentation of the muse format and the emacs mode usage.

What is THIS software ?

This software is an attempt at writing a parser and an API for publishing backends for the muse file format in Java. It is by now mainly useful for documenting maven 2 projects and integrates with maven's site production plugins and engine. More information on this can be found here).

While there exists already wiki-like formats for maven (eg. twiki, apt) and a great publishing tool for muse (eg. emacs !), I wanted to:

  1. use muse as my documenting format for maven because I live in emacs, I do most of my programming tasks in Java and I'm a great supporter of maven. So I need emacs support for editing muse files,
  2. not use emacs as a publishing tool because of the induced dependencies for potential users (especially in Windows and IT companies circles).

So I started this project with the following objectives:

  1. use all af muse syntax (see the status page for a current report on syntax supported by this parser and compatibility issues)
  2. integrates this parser in the site plugin and the Doxia publishing system
  3. provide a simple command-line tool for publishing XHTML output
  4. provide an extensible API for link resolving, parsing customization, tags, dynamic content generation...

Is it stable and how can I make use of it ?

The stability of this package is asserted by the version number, as usual. The latest muse-parser version is 1.0-rc2. I follow the somewhat standard scheme:

Currently, muse-parser can be used either as a tool for generating project's site with maven or as a standalone utility for publishing a set of directories in XHTML format. I think it is however a better startegy to just use the former and use emacs mode for the latter. In all cases, muse-parser works best in conjunction with emacs as an editor providing syntax highlighting, hyperlinks navigation and nice keyboard shortcuts.

Of course, this package's documentation is written in muse format and this site is generated with the maven extension !