Greetings. Salaam. This is Mohsen Banan. I am a
software and internet engineer.
The title of this presentation is ``Blee-LCNT:
An Emacs Centered Content Production and
Self-Publication Framework''.
Blee stands for ByStar Libre-Halaal
Emacs Environment. In last year's EmacsConf, I
introduced Blee, BISOS and ByStar as concepts and
as foundations. This year I want to focus on one
concrete capability. Content Production and
Self-Publication is a foundational Blee and BISOS
Capability Bundle. Both this presentation and the
Nature of Polyexistentials book were developed
with Blee-LCNT. In this presentation I want to
look at Emacs as a central ingredient for a usage
environment that we can use to orchestrate
production of quite fancy multi-media
presentations. Let's consider two different
scopes. First, the scope of Blee-LCNT
Capabilities Bundle, which is that of a complete
multi-media content authorship, generation,
publication and distribution framework. That
complete scope is presented in this slide and it
spans both black ink and violet ink. Second, the
scope of this presentation, which is more
limited. In this presentation I confine myself to
the bullets is violet ink. Here, I focus on
presentation and video as content types and their
authorship and generation and their federated
re-publication. This is a common topic. It makes
good sense for us to start with a review of prior
art and similar art. I went through the past
EmacsConf talks and found a good number of them
that also deal with the topic of content
generation. A few of these are included in black
ink in this slide. Many of these have chosen the
Babel, in other words Org-Mode+LaTeX as primary
input. I prefer the inverse of that. I also
looked for past talks which have used Reveal.js
and LaTeX-Beamer. For example, Sacha's use of
Reveal.js is shown in violet inK. And Ihor's use
of Beamer is in teal ink. This presentation is
about a combination of Reveal.js and
LaTeX-Beamer. For those who may not be familiar
with Beamer and Reveal, here is a quick intro.
Among academics, LaTeX-Beamer is the go to tool
for producing presentations. Reveal.js is
recognized as the best of breed for dispensing
HTML slide decks. For many, Reveal and Beamer
live in different universes. Beamer is pdf
oriented and Reveal is html oriented. Combining
two powerful tools makes for an even more
powerful tool. This Blee-LCNT Presentations
combines the best of LaTeX-Beamer with Reveal.js.
Beamer primarily functions as producer and Reveal
functions as dispenser and multi-media enhancer.
Here is how the combination works. LaTeX Beamer
pdf result is disected into named frame images
which can then be inserted in Reveal.js. LaTeX
Beamer frames can also be translated into html
with HeVeA which can also be inserted in
Reveal.js. Voice-overs for Beamer frames can be
correlated to frame names and applied to image or
html frames. Screen captures and image narrations
as videos can be directly dispensed through
Reveal. There are various additional novel
concepts with regard to the way that we have
integrated all of this together. Instead of
Org-Mode+LaTeX, we do LaTeX+Org-Mode. Instead of
Babel, we do COMEEGA, instead of the Literate
model we introduce the Surrounded model. You
shall see various examples of these shortly. All
of this is part of a bigger picture. A much
bigger picture. My talks at EmacsConf 2021, 2022
and 2024 are related. This 2025 talk builds on
those. Last year's talk ``About Blee: enveloping
our own autonomy directed digital ecosystem with
Emacs'' in particular, lays the foundations for
this talk. If you have not seen that, it would
make good send to review it. In my previous talks
I have been criticized of having a ``prophetic''
style. The scope of ByStar is lofty and immense.
In many ways it is unbelievable. And EmacsConf
talks are meant to be short. So, as a result,
sometimes I end up being cryptic. Having accepted
the ``prophetic'' criticism as legitimate, I now
need to put a book on the table. With that book
in place, moving forward, when needing to be
cryptic, I shall cite Chapter and Verse. I am
delighted to announce the availability of my
recent book, ``Nature of Polyexistentials''. The
full title of my book is: Nature Of
Polyexistentials --- Basis For Abolishment Of The
Western Intellectual Property Rights Regime ---
And Introduction Of The Libre-Halaal ByStar
Digital Ecosystem. Knowledge, know-how, uses of
know-how, ideas, formulas, software and
information are inherently non-scarce. They are
\textbf {polyexistentials}. Unlike
monoexistentials which exist in singular,
polyexistentials naturally exist in multiples.
What is abundant in nature is being made
artificially scarce through man-made ownership
rules called copyright and patents. These
mistaken ownership rules, the so called Western
IPR regime, has immense ramifications on the
shape the direction of the American Digital
Ecosystem. It would be an understatement to say
that the American Digital Ecosystem has put
humanity in danger. Two parts of the book, in
particular are of immediate relevance. Part III,
the ethics layer, focuses on contours of cures.
Having dismissed the Western intellectual
property rights (IPR) regime as an erroneous
governance model for polyexistentials, I propose
the Libre-Halaal model of governance of
polyexistentials towards facilitating
conviviality of tools. Part IV, the engineering
layer, introduces the Libre-Halaal ByStar Digital
Ecosystem. as an ethical alternative to the
prevailing proprietary American digital
ecosystem. The book also provides additional
details about the content generation and
publication facilities that I am presenting here.
And the book itself, as content, was generated
and published using the facilities that I am
presenting here. You can think of this book as
being in two volumes. Our focus are Blee and
BISOS in Volume II. Volume I deals with the
general concept of polyexistence and invalidity
of IPR and our terminoloy of Libre-Halaal ---
instead of the common but ill directed vocabulary
of Free Software and Open-Source and FOSS. In
Chapter 11, I introduce the very sensitive and
potent vocabulary of Halaal and Libre-Halaal. The
contents of this book belong to all of humanity
and verbatim copying of it is unrestricted. If
you want to read it, this book is yours. The
``Nature of Polyexistentials'' book is available
both online and in print. This book is available
as two editions. The US Edition and the
International edition. The US Edition is written
with a slightly milder Western unfriendly tone,
while the International Edition includes
additional original content in Farsi. I consider
the International Edition to be the authoritative
version. However, many readers in the US and
Western countries may prefer the US Edition. I
maintain separate Git repositories for each
edition on GitHub: US Edition is at bxplpc/120033
and International Edition: bxplpc/120074 Cloning
these repositories will give you access to the
book in PDF format (suitable for both A4 and US
Letter printing) and in EPUB format.
Alternatively, the content can be downloaded
directly from your browser without needing to
clone the repositories. To ensure broader online
availability and stability, I have also published
the book on Zenodo, complete with a DOI (Digital
Object Identifier). You can download both the A4
and 8.5 x 11 PDFs from there as well. The book is
also available in print on Amazon and at most
major bookstores in the US and Western regions.
The ISBNs for both editions are included in this
slide. Additionally, I have published this book
in Iran through Jangal Publishers. I did not
write this book for profit. My aim is to share my
thoughts and encourage readers to engage with my
views and ideas. Your feedback is welcome, and I
am genuinely interested in hearing your
perspectives. In Western markets, I have priced
the print edition somewhat above production
costs. If you find value in the book and the
ByStar project, purchasing a copy will help
support my work. Thanks in advance for your
support. And here are the same links as a native
Reveal slide. If instead of a video, you are
viewing this presentation as a Reveal web page,
you can just click on the pointers and URLs.
Instead of the traditional model of giving you
recipes in a DIY context towards the goal of
creating content processing capabilities on top
of what you may already have, I am doing the
opposite. I am saying: take this whole BISOS and
Blee thing, and in there you will also have the
content processing capabilities that I am
speaking of here. So, at the top level we have
our own autonomy and privacy directed digital
ecosystem, which in contrast to the center
oriented American digital ecosystem, is edge
oriented. We call it: ``The Libre-Halaal ByStar
Digital Ecosystem''. All the systems in ByStar,
run BISOS (By* Internet Services OS), which is a
layer on top of Debian. The usage environment of
ByStar and BISOS is Blee which is a layer on top
of Emacs. With those in place, we then create a
capability bundle called Blee-LCNT. So, when you
buy into Blee and BISOS, you will naturally also
get these content processing capabilities ---
without a need for any recipies or DIY effort. If
you were to look at the model that I introduced
as containment hierarchies, it would look like
this. We love Emacs and we love Unix because
their design is convivial. By convivial, I am
referring to Ivan Illich's concept and
terminology of ``Tools for Conviviality''. It was
first published in 1973. It's a must read. A goal
of the design of the ByStar Digital Ecosystem is
to enlarge the aggregated conviviality of its
capabilities. What distinguishes Blee-Lcnt from
other content processing tools and frameworks, is
our emphasis on enhancing the aggregated
conviviality. These tools let you express
yourself. They let you be in charge. Here is our
parts list. These are the components that we have
chosen to bring together towards our goal of
creating convivial tools. In this slide we are
using black ink to denote exisiting tools and we
use violet ink to denote pieces that we have
developed towards cohesive integration. To see
how all of this comes together let's first
consider what gets produced. For example, for
this video, the video is just one of the outputs.
There are other outputs as well. In this figure,
the outputs are shown in the top layer. Using
this video as an example, this presentation's
output also include the ``Presentation Form'' and
the ``Article-Presentation Form''. Let's look at
these more closely. For Presentations, there are
3 different forms. The Video Form, the
Presentation From and the Article-Presentation
Form. The Presentation Form produces both a pdf
output and Reveal output. Next we will
walkthrough some of the benefits that
availability of these forms and formats provide.
The video presentation that you are watching is
just one of the outputs of the Blee-LCNT
machinery. There are two PDF format outputs and
two HTML outputs that are also quite useful. The
primary output of Beamer is a set of slides that
people use to give their talks with. Typically
that's done live. In my case I dissect the images
of each frame and do a voiceover on it and then
dispense it through reveal. In a second you will
see that as well. This PDF output is very useful.
You get the table of contents of course and in
addition to that Beamer generates navigations for
you where on any part you get a small table of
content as well. This is heavily used amongst
academics and it's a good output on its own and
I'm augmenting it in a variety of ways. In
addition to the presentation PDF format there is
also an article-presentation PDF format which
gives you the same content but it gives it to you
in a textual form with the table of content and
the rest. This is a good form to use when you are
giving for example class lectures and the
students often prefer this format. Now for the
HTML format outputs the most relevant of course
is the reveal itself. If you have not used reveal
before. In my view it's a HTML slide dispenser. I
don't look at it as a presentation framework. I
use, as you are seeing, we use Beamer to feed
into it and we use it to dispense the
information. It has all the typical navigation
capabilities that you would expect and most of
what I have as slides are images but occasionally
particularly when there is a need to provide
pointers, HTML pointers. I then also include a
textual output. This is also produced from the
Beamer latex source but it's HTML through textual
HTML through HeVeA not the image. You can you get
a table of contents. You can navigate and there
are a whole lot of other features that reveal
also provides. So to generate the video, what I
do is I come to the very beginning of the
presentation. I turn on the screen capture
recorder and then I start playing the voiceover
for each slide and at the very end you get a
video but what you just did is you dispensed
every frame one at a time through reveal. In
addition to this HTML form you also get a article
presentation form of it with a full table of
content and the videos are there and the notes
are there and this is also quite useful. Now,
let's look at the one single input file that
produced all of the outputs that we just saw. I
have put both the input file and some of the
output files for this presentation on github.
Here are some links to these repos and files. And
here are the same links as a native Reveal slide.
This figure gives us an overview of how one set
of inputs encapsulted in a single file can
produce all of the outputs that we saw. The main
TeX file shown at the bottom is processed by both
XeLaTeX and by HeVeA. That main TeX file, in
addition to LaTeX syntax also include org-mode
constructs that facilitate addition of audio and
video files. Later, I'll walkthrough the
bodyPresArtEnFa.tex file that generated this very
presentation with you. When you construct that
primary TeX file, there are several abstractions
that you need to keep in mind. Is my presentation
going to go from Left-To-Right or from
Right-To-Left? Perso-Arabic presentations go from
Right-To-Left. Another consideration is the types
of forms of results that you want. Just the
presentation or Article-Presentation as well?
With those choices in place you can produce
condition based text for each of your desired
outputs. Think of this video presentation as a
sequence of frames. Each frame is controlled by
an org-mode dynamic block. This table lists
available dblocks from which you can choose. For
example, this particular frame that we are
watching is controlled by
b:lcnt:pres:frame/derivedImage. Beamer creates a
pdf file that includes the image of this slide.
That image is then injected into Reveal. And in
the end a video of that image is produced with
the narrations that I am uttering right now. All
of this has similarly been applied to each and
every frame that you have been watching. Similar
to Frame Controls, there are org-mode dynamic
blocks for ``Frame Body Types''. You can easily
insert an image which is typically created by
OpenOffice Draw into a frame. Same with say a
screen capture video. Now that we have looked at
the ``Outputs'' and the ``Inputs'', let's look at
how the Outputs are generated from the Inputs.
Let's bootstrap Raw-BISOS and Raw-Blee. Starting
from scratch, get yourself a fresh copy of Debian
12. Then go to https://github.com/bxGenesis/start
The README.org file of that github repo is same
as Chapter 18, ``Engineering Adoption of BISOS
and ByStar'' of the book. We will next run
``raw-bisos.sh'', but prior to that let's take a
quick look. This bootstrap scripts will do a lot
as root on your Fresh-Debian. It is best to first
try it on a disposable VM. raw-bisos.sh adds the
current debian user to sudoers. Then it installs
pipx. And then with pipx it installs from PyPI
bisos.provision. bisos.provision includes
additional bash scripts that are then executed.
Full installation involves setting up various
accounts, groups, various directory hierarchies,
lots of apt packages and lots of python packages
from the bisos namespace. If you are ready, copy
and paste this line and run it. You will be
prompted for the root password. Then be patient.
Full installation can take 15 minutes or so. The
logs of this script are also captured in
~/raw-bisos-${dateTag}-log.org Now that we have
Raw-BISOS and Raw-Blee installed, we are ready to
walkthrough the unified source of the very
presentation that you are watching. The
``bodyPresArtEnFa.tex'' file that we will visit
is in COMEEGA-LaTeX syntax with lots of org-mode
dblocks which generate Beamer-LaTeX frames and
conditioned LaTeX bodies. After the walkthrough
I'll describe dblocks and COMEEGA in more detail.
At the tail end of the walkthrough, we will also
go through the generation process which runs
XeLaTeX and HeVeA and a lot more. Let's look at
our input file. It's a LaTeX file in LaTeX mode
and it has org syntax org-mode included in it and
I can toggle between LaTeX and org-mode so, now
I'm gonna be in org-mode and org-mode gives me
everything that org has to offer including a very
convenient navigation framework. So let's take
one slide and take a look at how it was done. So
I would come to this scope slide and while I am
there I'm gonna click on N. N takes me to the
native LaTeX form back so that I'll be looking at
it not in org but in LaTeX. So we're back in
LaTeX and as you can see it uses a dynamic block
starting with the comments and the BEGIN and it
uses the dynamic a dynamic block named a
framedDrive image which means the content of this
frame will be dispensed as an image not as text
and it also automatically creates for me a name,
a label, that can be used for voiceover
augmentation. So a file in the audio directory
called ScopeOfBleeLcnt.mp3 is this audio that
will come on top of this slide and then the rest
is the LaTeX itself. The concept of ``Org Dynamic
Blocks'' is very powerful. I think of them as
universal visible macros. But, why should they be
primarily used in just Org-Mode. I say let's
generalize them to ``Emacs Dynamic Blocks''. Have
defaults for org-dblock-start-re in every
relevant mode and use them everywhere. Blee does
that. In COMEEGA-LaTeX, Dynamic Blocks create
Frame Controls and insert Image and Video
contents. Much of Blee and BISOS are implemented
in COMEEGA. Almost all of our Elisp, Python, Bash
and LaTeX work uses COMEEGA. COMEEGA stands for
Collaborative Org-Mode Enhanced Emacs Generalized
Authorship. It is the inverse of org-babel.
COMEEGA adds org-mode to your programming mode.
Full and proper use of COMEEGA, requires
Polymode. Let's call that Poly-COMEEGA. But
Emacs's Polymode is work-in-progress,
particularly now with the new tree-sitter. So, in
the interim, my usage of COMEEGA has been in the
form of Toggle-COMEEGA. Where I manually switch
between the programming-mode and org-mode. For me
this has proved to be a fine interim solution.
Naturally, content processing should be
multi-lingual and internationalized. Let's look
at that dimension. I am Iranian and much of what
I write is in Farsi. Getting Perso-Arabic text
right is often a challenge, as it involves
Bi-Directional text (BIDI) and shaping of
characters. In the context of our content
generation these need to span all relevant tools,
not just emacs. For emacs, I have created my own
input method called farsi-transliterate-banan. My
EmacsConf 2021 talk was about that. Now let's
look at some examples and spice it up a bit with
semantics. As and example of proper BIDI text,
here is the orignal Farsi text along with English
translation of Imam Khomeini's text with respect
to invalidity of Western Inteletual Proprty
Rights regime. And as another example of proper
BIDI text, here is Ayatollah Mothari's take on
Western IPR not being private property. Note that
these predate by more than half a century Jack
Dorsey and Elon Musk's tweets of April 11, 2025
saying ``Delete all IP law''. This topic is too
important and too sensitive to be left to
American Billionaires and their tweets. Let me
again refer you to the logic of polyexistentials
in my book. Chapter 14 of the book is dedicated
to Ethics and ownership in Religions. With
respect to my preference for Ethics over Freedom,
let me refer you to Section 12.4 ``A Cynical
Perspective on Freedom Orientation of Americans''
in which I describe where the FOSS labels and the
likes of Stallman, Raymond, Moglen and Lessig
have gone wrong. If you are one of their
followers, perhaps Chapter 12 is for you. My
emphasis thus far has been on content generation.
Let's very briefly also look at Autonomous
Self-Publication and Federated Re-Publications of
our content. From the very beginning the Debian
folks understood the importance of
``Universality'' and coined the ``Universal
Debian'' label. This means that we can base our
entire digital ecosystem on just the Libre-Halaal
Debian distro. And that is what we have done with
ByStar. In ByStar everything is based on just the
Universal Debian everywhere. This has made our
Usage Environment totally harmonious with our
Service Environment allowing for very powerful
software-service continuums. Of course, All of
this is immediatly applicable to our ByStar
Content Bundle as well. Some have asked, why
don't you also include Ubuntu? I think the
opposite makes more sense. Ubuntu should converge
with Debian. I tried to explain this to Mark
Shuttleworth in an email a while back. I have
included that email in Section 12.1.5. In this
presentation, we have stopped at the
``Raw-BISOS'' stage. We can further evolve
Raw-BISOS and make it be ``Sited'' and provide
autonomous publication services. But here by
going through EmacsConf and youtube we are using
the ``Federated Re-Publications'' model.
Something this large, should be well documented.
In Emacs, the way that we have been dealing with
documentation and information retrieval is
archaic. Man-pages, TeXInfo, Helpful-Mode and
convention based Doc-Strings are old and limited.
In BISOS and Blee, we use Blee-Panels for all
kinds of documentation. Let me show you some
examples. So, what next? If Blee, BISOS, ByStar,
Libre-Halaal, Polyexistentials and these Content
Processing capabilities have piqued your
interest, please feel welcome to contact me.
These Emacs Conferences have proven to be very
useful and productive. I look forward to your
thoughts, feedback and questions. I want to thank
all the EmacsConf 2025 Organizers for their great
work. And Sacha in particular.