Nicolas Goaziou <mail@nicolasgoaziou.fr> writes:

> Hello,
>
> Titus von der Malsburg <malsburg@posteo.de> writes:
>
>> One issue with org-list-allow-alphabetical is that we get numbers
>> instead of letters when we export to HTML and LaTeX.  I saw the earlier
>> thread [0] that gives the reasoning for this but I find it
>> unsatisfying.  If Org allows us to distinguish between -, +, 1., 1), a.,
>> A., a), A), this should also be honored by the exporter.
>
> This is also why I dislike the feature.
>
>> Otherwise it’s rather pointless to allow that distinction in the first
>> place.
>
> Exactly.
>
>> IMHO, a clean solution would be to either drop everything but - and
>> 1. or to keep all these and make the exporters honor them.  The former
>> would breaks existing documents and is therefore out of the
>> question.  This leaves us with the second solution.
>
> I wouldn't rule that out. Breaking changes happen. We can provide tools
> to fix existing documents.
>
> Actually, I like the idea of keeping only "-" and "1.". We could
> implement other bullet types as overlays.
>
>> Any chance you are willing to reconsider the decision to ignore
>> allow-alphabetical during export?
>
> I still agree with Carsten in the thread you pointed out. Org document
> is about structure. The bullet in about typesetting.

I must admit, I haven't read the thread mentioned, and I am sure
Carsten's point was correct, but orgmode is more and more used for
non-structure tasks. As an example I see the whole field of reproductive
research and scientific paper writing, which, in my opinion, has many
more elements than structure. Another example are html emails (like them
or not - I also dislike them) which people compose in org, or org as a
LaTeX frontend.

Exporting, i.e. typesetting and sharing, becomes much more important
these days and possibly as important as the structure.

In a nutshell: I agree with Titus' point and also would love to have
alphabetical bullets.

But it is for me not that important if they are alphabetical or numeric
in org - a simple command / which I could put in front of the list, and
*which could be interpreted by the exporter* to do the right thing for
this list would be fine, simmilar to bold, verbtin, ...
The implementation would then be in the exporter.

Cheers,

Rainer

>
>> I think it would be very useful to have that. I know there are other
>> ways to get alphabetical bullets in exported documents but they are
>> all specific to certain export targets and the beauty of Org mode is
>> precisely that we can export to many different targets.
>
> The beauty of Org is also to allow to control different export targets
> in the same document.
>
> I think this is a non-issue.
>
> Regards,

-- 
Rainer M. Krug
email: Rainer<at>krugs<dot>de
PGP: 0x0F52F982