From: Titus von der Malsburg <malsburg@posteo.de>
To: emacs-orgmode@gnu.org
Subject: Feature request: lists with letters
Date: Thu, 02 Feb 2017 18:28:22 +0100 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <87shnwbiyx.fsf@posteo.de> (raw)
Items in lists can start with -, +, N), or N. (with N being an
integer). It’s currently not possible, to use letters as in the
following examples:
a. First item
b. Second item
or
a) First item
b) Second item
I believe it would make sense to allow letters in org-mode because
that’s a very common way to label items in lists. I know that this has
been discussed previously but to my knowledge there was no
resolution. The counter argument against letters was that we wouldn’t
know what labels to use when there are more items than letters, but I
think this shouldn’t stop us. Reasons:
a) Most lists have fewer items and cases where more than 26 labels are
needed are rare.
b) If a list has more than 26 items, the user is free to switch to
bullet points or numbers.
c) The limited number of letters hasn’t stopped people from using
letters in many other contexts. For example, LaTeX offers letters
and people think it’s useful.
d) Similarly, people often use Roman numerals (e.g., iv.) although
they also quickly become impractical (999 = CMXCIX).
e) In some (academic) contexts, e.g. in linguistics, letters are
conventionally used to label items in lists.
f) Letters worked perfectly fine in this list.
As to the question what org mode should do if a list is two long for
letters: Here are two possible solutions:
a) Label all items beyond the 26th with z, to make it visually very
salient that there are not enough letters.
b) Start over from letter a after z.
c) Count in base 26 using letters as digits: a … z aa … az ba … bz …
Personally, I would prefer solution c because it gives each item a
unique label to which we can refer. But solutions a and b would be ok,
too. It doesn’t really matter because this is just an uninteresting
edge case and we shouldn’t obsess about it when the default case (<=26
items) is complete unproblematic.
Thanks for considering this proposal.
Titus
next reply other threads:[~2017-02-02 17:28 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 24+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2017-02-02 17:28 Titus von der Malsburg [this message]
2017-02-02 17:55 ` Feature request: lists with letters Nicolas Goaziou
2017-02-02 19:42 ` Titus von der Malsburg
2017-02-02 19:57 ` Nicolas Goaziou
2017-02-02 20:05 ` Titus von der Malsburg
2017-02-02 20:19 ` Nicolas Goaziou
2017-02-02 20:33 ` Eric Abrahamsen
2017-02-03 8:50 ` Rainer M Krug
2017-02-03 16:22 ` William Denton
-- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2017-02-03 11:37 Titus von der Malsburg
[not found] <1622a63fda844eb1aa553fdcd19a5758@HE1PR01MB1898.eurprd01.prod.exchangelabs.com>
2017-02-03 12:40 ` Eric S Fraga
2017-02-03 13:47 ` Titus von der Malsburg
2017-02-06 15:34 ` Rasmus
2017-02-06 19:59 ` Titus von der Malsburg
2017-02-09 9:29 ` Rasmus
2017-02-10 10:58 ` Titus von der Malsburg
2017-02-11 1:20 ` Nicolas Goaziou
2017-02-13 10:51 ` Rasmus
2017-02-13 13:47 ` Nicolas Goaziou
2017-02-13 16:55 ` Rasmus
2017-02-13 20:39 ` Nicolas Goaziou
2017-02-14 11:25 ` Rasmus
2017-02-14 12:57 ` Nicolas Goaziou
[not found] ` <9385a1ca2a23417399fb441d6d85795d@HE1PR01MB1898.eurprd01.prod.exchangelabs.com>
2017-02-11 12:39 ` Eric S Fraga
Reply instructions:
You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:
* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
and reply-to-all from there: mbox
Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style
List information: https://www.orgmode.org/
* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
switches of git-send-email(1):
git send-email \
--in-reply-to=87shnwbiyx.fsf@posteo.de \
--to=malsburg@posteo.de \
--cc=emacs-orgmode@gnu.org \
/path/to/YOUR_REPLY
https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html
* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line
before the message body.
Code repositories for project(s) associated with this public inbox
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs/org-mode.git
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for read-only IMAP folder(s) and NNTP newsgroup(s).