On Aug 29, 2010, at 7:46 PM, Nick Dokos wrote:

> Scot Becker <scot.becker@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> He wants to write up a document using org-mode's outline facilities  
>> as
>> a skeleton to help him build up, navigate and visualize his document,
>> but then he wants only to use SOME of the headlines but ALL of the
>> text when he actually makes a printed version for others to read.
>> I've wanted this as well, since when you think about it the structure
>> you need as a writer may not be the structure you want to pass on to
>> your readers.
>>
>
> OK, thanks for the clarification: that was one of the interpretations
> that did not make much sense to me, but I was looking at it from a  
> much
> more rigid point of view, where the headlines are what give  
> structure to
> the document, so you want to preserve them at all costs; I wasn't
> thinking about different meanings that they might have for different
> people.
>
> However, it still sounds like an ill-defined problem to me: in
> particular, your manual algorithm would wreak havoc on an outline with
> headlines at multiple levels. What is the "real" algorithm supposed to
> do with something like this:
>
> ,----
> | * foo
> | text1
> | ** foo1
> | text2
> | * bar                  :omit-this-header:
> | text3
> | **bar2                 :omit-this-header:
> | text4
> | ***bar3
> | text5
> `----
>
> Or are we supposed to imagine headings at a single level only?
>
> I suspect that one would be better off with two (or more) outlines:  
> one for
> the writer, one for the reader (perhaps one for each class of  
> readers), with
> some way to pick text from one outline and plug it into the other(s).
>
> Nick

Aloha Alan et al.,

This is what I use LaTeX blocks in Babel for.  The outline stuff that  
helps me write is separate from the stuff I actually write.  I've been  
doing this for a while now and have been amazed at how much of what I  
write gets left behind, including headlines.

All the best,
Tom