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* Footnotes and org-export, revisited
@ 2008-12-17 12:52 Scot Becker
  2008-12-17 13:28 ` Paul R
                   ` (3 more replies)
  0 siblings, 4 replies; 26+ messages in thread
From: Scot Becker @ 2008-12-17 12:52 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: emacs-orgmode

Dear all,

I'm a new org user who recently ran across the video of Carsten's
Google talk. I have been looking for something like org for years, but
learning Emacs had always seemed too high a price, so I never really
considered Emacs-based options.  However time is a teacher, and I see
now that there are plenty of other higher prices than learning Emacs,
which has anyway proved easier than I thought.  Org-mode is really an
amazing piece of work, a highly original piece of software, and
possibly just what this vim user needs. When I think how much time I
spent other solutions, including vim's two (basically unmaintained and
functionally feeble) outline modes, I can only resign myself to the
mild shame.

The following is in response to a brief thread posted to this list in
October by Matthew Lundin.  He described the limitations of
footnotes.el, and suggested two possibilities for extending footnotes
support in org-mode. [1].

The problem with Steve L. Baur's (otherwise useful) footnotes mode is
that it cannot 'read' the contents of a loaded buffer.  So in any
given editing session, footnote numbering always starts with 1, even
if you already had 1...10 in your file from a previous editing
session.  This is simply a limitation of the mode in its current
state.  I expect the package's scope was originally confined to using
footnotes in plain text emails, which are generally finished in one
shot.

There have been some efforts to overcome this limitation by means of a
patch to  footnote.el [2] and a new function, footnote-init.el [3]
which reads the contents of a newly loaded  buffer so that the patched
footnote.el 'knows' about previously placed footnotes.  These
particular patches may not have all the kinks worked out, however,[4]
and are not part of the current CVS of Emacs 23.

But someone working in Muse did write an interesting extension to
Muse's footnote support. (The extension is explained here [5], and the
revised version of the code is here [6]). It is basically a hook
function which converts footnotes with reference names[fn:named_note]
to plain, numbered footnotes, like Muse and org-mode support. It
operates on a temporary buffer  just before export to LaTeX or HTML,
so is transparent to the user.

 I too would like to make use of org-mode to do more extensive
footnoting than the current footnote.el easily allows.  I'm not sure
of the best solution.  Here are the alternatives I can think of:

1.  Help Baur's footnotes.el get to the point where it has no trouble
with multiple editing sessions and managing the numbering of any
arbitrary quantity of footnotes.  This is possible in theory.  But I
suspect that footnotes associated with body text by simple Arabic
numerals are pretty easy to mangle in a simple text system that lets
you do arbitrary things with the text. Comments?

2.  Adapt the Muse code mentioned above for use with org-mode.  This
would keep org-mode's current footnote support unchanged, but allow
named footnotes while writing. Carsten suggested something like this
in his response to Matthew.

3.  Add named footnote support to org-mode according to Matthew's
second suggestion (similar to footnote functionality in Pandoc,
Multi-Markdown or ReST). This could optionally include a function for
the auto-generation of short (?) unique-ish IDs  to use instead of
names (in a long document, giving named references to dozens of
similar footnotes could itself be a source of confusion).

4.  Forget org-mode for anything with any quantity of footnotes.  This
is Carsten's other suggestion in response to Matthew.  It's possible
that the practicalities of footnote handling would prove too costly to
get right.  He knows this much better than I.  (though I'm not sure
that they impair org's plan-text readability as Carsten suggests.

5.  A final solution (which might also gain other advantages) could be
to begin to facilitate an org-export mode to Pandoc's native
plain-text syntax (an extension of Markdown).[7] Pandoc is a robust
Haskell engine to convert between plain text formats.  This would add
a step to org-mode export, but that one step could potentially allow
conversion into the wide range of formats that Pandoc supports
(markdown, reStructuredText, HTML, LaTeX, ConTeXt, RTF, DocBook XML,
OpenDocument XML, ODT, GNU Texinfo, MediaWiki markup, groff man pages,
and S5 HTML slide shows). Pandoc's syntax model already has a lot in
common with org's.  (Both allow LaTeX pass-through, for example).  I
don't know if such an export would meet the effort vs. value trade
off, but I suggest it might.

Comments? (by anyone who summoned the patience to read all of  that...
sorry for the length.  I couldn't manage less).

Scot B.

Footnotes:
[1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.orgmode/8373
[2] http://groups.google.com/group/gnu.emacs.sources/browse_thread/thread/49c826201105d1e9/7c3ea8323041f91c?lnk=gst&q=footnote#7c3ea8323041f91c
[3] http://groups.google.com/group/gnu.emacs.sources/browse_thread/thread/e809fa5d396a7aa2/1d001b35388725b4?lnk=gst&q=footnote#1d001b35388725b4
[4] http://osdir.com/ml/emacs.muse.general/2007-11/msg00012.html
[5] https://mail.gna.org/public/muse-el-discuss/2007-11/msg00027.html
[6] https://mail.gna.org/public/muse-el-discuss/2007-11/msg00033.html
[namednote] Like this.
[7] http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 26+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2009-01-12 14:25 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 26+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2008-12-17 12:52 Footnotes and org-export, revisited Scot Becker
2008-12-17 13:28 ` Paul R
2008-12-17 13:31 ` Carsten Dominik
2008-12-17 15:29   ` Paul R
2008-12-17 15:59     ` Scot Becker
2008-12-17 20:54       ` Matthew Lundin
2008-12-17 22:23         ` Scot Becker
2008-12-17 16:08     ` Carsten Dominik
2008-12-17 16:32       ` Paul R
2008-12-17 16:58         ` Carsten Dominik
2008-12-17 17:25           ` Paul R
2008-12-17 17:18     ` Sivaram Neelakantan
2008-12-18  8:08       ` Carsten Dominik
2008-12-18 17:13         ` Sivaram Neelakantan
2008-12-18 10:34       ` Peter Frings
2008-12-18 10:55         ` Peter Frings
2008-12-17 14:04 ` Jörg Hagmann
2009-01-01  9:07 ` Carsten Dominik
2009-01-01 16:48   ` Matthew Lundin
2009-01-01 17:10     ` Carsten Dominik
2009-01-02 15:10       ` Matthew Lundin
2009-01-03  8:17         ` Carsten Dominik
2009-01-03 22:53           ` Matthew Lundin
2009-01-04  7:39             ` Carsten Dominik
2009-01-12 11:29               ` Scot Becker
2009-01-12 14:21                 ` Paul R

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