macros: escaping "," and comments

From: Stefan Vollmar <vollmar@nf.mpg.de>
To: emacs-orgmode Mailinglist <emacs-orgmode@gnu.org>
Subject: macros: escaping "," and comments
Date: Fri, 13 Aug 2010 00:02:09 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <1197F101-8BBB-4FF8-8289-47CB2306842A@nf.mpg.de> (raw)

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Hello,

we are currently changing our institute's web site so that staff members can have a personal page: they can submit Org-mode files which are then automatically converted to (rather nice) HTML pages. One advantage is that this allows us to give staff members a lot of freedom to create content while keeping a "corporate identity" look (and getting the director's permission in the first place).

Our template needs a macro in the org template to create a more "fancy" summary of personal information with a table, a portrait and some icons (aside: please note that you can create really complex HTML code this way if necessary).

Here is a very simple example:

#+title: test
#+macro: mhead #+html: <table><tr><td> email: $1</td><td> phone: $2</td></tr></table>

{{{mhead(
somebody@somewhere.org, 
1-234-2134 
)}}}

Imagine more lines (job description, fax, homepage, etc) and a more complex table (hidden in a setup file). Having users provide information in this way is not ideal, but has worked surprisingly well (the rest of the template is "proper" Org-mode content).

When creating the Org templates we ran into these problems with Org-mode 7.01 and Emacs 23.2.1:

(1) How can we escape "," in the macro call? Ideally, we would need something like this:

{{{mhead(
one entry\, still the same entry, 
the second variable...

(2) It would be nice to use something like this:

{{{mhead(
# Email
somebody@somewhere.org, 
# Phone
1-234-2134 
)}}}

However, the "#" lines are currently not ignored (as comments) when expanding the macro, these kind of comment lines would be helpful when providing templates in general.

(3) if, in the above example, we delete the #+title line before the macro definition, that macro stops working (the macro definition is not interpreted as such). It seems there must be at least one line with arbitraty contents before the macro definition (bug?).

I think, that (1) (maybe it is already possible - apologies if I overlooked something) and (2) would be useful features in Org-mode. 

Many thanks in advance for any help with this.

Warm regards,
 Stefan
-- 
Dr. Stefan Vollmar, Dipl.-Phys.
Head of IT group
Max-Planck-Institut für neurologische Forschung
Gleuelerstr. 50, 50931 Köln, Germany
Tel.: +49-221-4726-213  FAX +49-221-4726-298
Tel.: +49-221-478-5713  Mobile: 0160-93874279
Email: vollmar@nf.mpg.de   http://www.nf.mpg.de

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