14.1.4 Publishing action

Publishing means that a file is copied to the destination directory and possibly transformed in the process. The default transformation is to export Org files as HTML files, and this is done by the function org-publish-org-to-html which calls the HTML exporter (see HTML Export). But you can also publish your content as PDF files using org-publish-org-to-pdf, or as ASCII, Texinfo, etc., using the corresponding functions.

If you want to publish the Org file as an ‘.org’ file but with archived, commented, and tag-excluded trees removed, use org-publish-org-to-org. This produces ‘file.org’ and put it in the publishing directory. If you want a htmlized version of this file, set the parameter :htmlized-source to t. It produces ‘file.org.html’ in the publishing directory¹⁴¹.

Other files like images only need to be copied to the publishing destination; for this you can use org-publish-attachment. For non-Org files, you always need to specify the publishing function:

:publishing-function

Function executing the publication of a file. This may also be a list of functions, which are all called in turn.

:htmlized-source

Non-nil means, publish htmlized source.

The function must accept three arguments: a property list containing at least a :publishing-directory property, the name of the file to be published, and the path to the publishing directory of the output file. It should take the specified file, make the necessary transformation, if any, and place the result into the destination folder.