I don't have the impression you would need to hijack the export process. It
seems like you would need to call a function that gets data from some
source (e.g the org document) and then populates a template with that data,
and once that is done, call a regular export function. There are a  number
of template solutions: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CategoryTemplates. I
am not sure these are too easy to adapt to what you describe.

I played around with some ideas for this here:

http://kitchingroup.cheme.cmu.edu/blog/2014/01/20/Alternatives-to-long-complex-format-statements-in-emacs-lisp/
http://kitchingroup.cheme.cmu.edu/blog/2014/01/26/Another-alternative-to-string-templates/

Something like these could be used to populate a template I think.

John

-----------------------------------
Professor John Kitchin
Doherty Hall A207F
Department of Chemical Engineering
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
412-268-7803
@johnkitchin
http://kitchingroup.cheme.cmu.edu


On Sat, Aug 8, 2015 at 12:48 AM, Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>
wrote:

> Exporting org files and subtrees is awfully flexible, given all the
> possible customizations, but for a long while I've occasionally felt the
> need to come at the "export" process from the other direction: instead
> of customizing the export appearance of a series of headings, instead
> starting with a common block of export text, and interpolating values
> from the headings into that text -- ie, templating.
>
> I've felt this need off and on for a couple of years, most recently when
> organizing a small literary festival. I really need to keep all the
> information about the events in a single place, otherwise I know that
> information will go stale right away. But I need the information in a
> series of such wildly-varying formats that I can't imagine setting up
> (and switching between) export filters in a way that wouldn't make me
> cry. Not to mention that the different "export" use-cases all have their
> own per-heading boilerplate text, and there's no way I'm going to repeat
> all that different boilerplate under each heading.
>
> Obviously there's many ways this could be done. I could somehow hijack
> the export process -- in many cases it would be nice too make use of the
> skeleton document structures that export provides.
>
> Or maybe dynamic blocks? I've never used them before. Or maybe just a
> plain old `org-map-entries', which reads the template text from an
> external file and then steals some of the macro expansion functions to
> fill out the values.
>
> Has anyone wanted to do this before? Has anyone actually done it? Any
> thoughts or suggestions would be much appreciated!
>
> Yours,
> Eric
>
>
>