Org Radio

Org Radio

[David O'Toole]

I'm writing an add-on for Org (again!)

This one is called radio.el. It lets you annotate files (or even
individual lines within files) with arbitrary org subtrees.

This program is very preliminary, but it does work, and I'd be
interested to hear people's thoughts. I have an audio-related
application in mind that I'll show you later this week---adding tags
and todo items to audio files, and even annotating timespans within
audio files.

Download radio.el from
http://emacs-ontology-project.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/radio.el

Re: Org Radio

[Dan Griswold]

Darn, I thought this was going to be a PODCAST for org-mode!

Joking aside, good work David!

Dan

-- 
--------------
Dan Griswold
Rochester, NY
--------------

Re: Org Radio

[Bastien]

Hi David,

"David O'Toole" <dto@gnu.org> writes:

> I'm writing an add-on for Org (again!)
>
> This one is called radio.el. It lets you annotate files (or even
> individual lines within files) with arbitrary org subtrees.

Great!  I played with it a bit, and I like the general idea.  I thought
about doing something similar a while ago, because the one thing I lack
in Emacs is the ability to take notes against one particular file and to
see from within the file if there are notes attached to it...

Maybe one direction for further improvements: I don't really like the
glyph ":>".  I would prefer that taking notes is done against a region
and that the whole region get overlayed when you activate radio-mode (or
whatever mode it could be.)

Remember the GPLv3 comment process and the way comments were overlined.
Turning your mode on could overline regions that are annotated, and
those overlined regions could link to the note in the attached Org
file...  

Does this fit with your use of the tool ?

-- 
Bastien

Re: Org Radio

[David O'Toole]

Hello Bastien,

I really like the region idea. However it could be very tricky to
implement. The annotations in the radio file would be matched to
regions in the target file. So presumably we save the region's
coordinates in the radio file along with its annotation. We can use
markers and overlay properties to keep these data consistent in the
face of changes that happen in an Emacs buffer, but if a file can
change outside Emacs (i.e. annotating a shared file in version
control) then we have a problem, because (in the new model you are
suggesting) there was never anything in the file itself to indicate
which regions go with which annotations. That model is interesting
because it means you can annotate files without changing them
(i.e. notes on /etc). But I don't see how to keep the radio file from
breaking.

But maybe I am missing an obvious solution---can you give more details
on the GPLv3 thing you are referring to?

--dave

From: Bastien <bzg@altern.org>
Subject: Re: [Orgmode] Org Radio
Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2007 19:49:34 +0100

> Hi David,
> 
> "David O'Toole" <dto@gnu.org> writes:
> 
> > I'm writing an add-on for Org (again!)
> >
> > This one is called radio.el. It lets you annotate files (or even
> > individual lines within files) with arbitrary org subtrees.
> 
> Great!  I played with it a bit, and I like the general idea.  I thought
> about doing something similar a while ago, because the one thing I lack
> in Emacs is the ability to take notes against one particular file and to
> see from within the file if there are notes attached to it...
> 
> Maybe one direction for further improvements: I don't really like the
> glyph ":>".  I would prefer that taking notes is done against a region
> and that the whole region get overlayed when you activate radio-mode (or
> whatever mode it could be.)
> 
> Remember the GPLv3 comment process and the way comments were overlined.
> Turning your mode on could overline regions that are annotated, and
> those overlined regions could link to the note in the attached Org
> file...  
> 
> Does this fit with your use of the tool ?
> 
> -- 
> Bastien

Re: Org Radio

[Bastien]

David O'Toole <dto@gnu.org> writes:

> I really like the region idea. However it could be very tricky to
> implement. The annotations in the radio file would be matched to
> regions in the target file. So presumably we save the region's
> coordinates in the radio file along with its annotation. We can use
> markers and overlay properties to keep these data consistent in the
> face of changes that happen in an Emacs buffer, but if a file can
> change outside Emacs (i.e. annotating a shared file in version
> control) then we have a problem

Of course, you're right.  

Maybe the easy solution would be to implement two ways of annotating:
region-wise or pseudomarker-wise.  You would annotate regions in files
that are not supposed to change (e.g. pdftotext'ed text files) and you
would "insert" annotations in texts that are likely to change.

The process I have in mind for first kind of annotations is something
like this:

1. you're in your text buffer (file.txt)
2. M-x org-remember
3. Use a template that knows about the filename and the region

When you open file.txt, you can turn org-annotation-minor-mode on, and
*see* whether the text is annotated.  The minor-mode would do this:

1. fetch annotations in files that are reached by M-x org-remember
2. put an overlay on these regions (if a region is annotated twice, 
   show this by modifying the overlay - maybe different colors)

What do you think?

> But maybe I am missing an obvious solution---can you give more details
> on the GPLv3 thing you are referring to?

See this:

  http://gplv3.fsf.org/comments/gfdl-draft-1.html

As you can see, commented regions get colored.  More commented ones are
darker.  It would be *really* nice if we could implement something like
this in Emacs, with Org.

The one thing I currently miss in Emacs is the ability to annotate a
file and directly see those annotations in the buffer.

-- 
Bastien

Re: Org Radio

[Adam Spiers]

On Mon, Dec 17, 2007 at 09:23:45AM -0500, David O'Toole wrote:
> Download radio.el from
> http://emacs-ontology-project.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/radio.el

I just tried to, but couldn't:

  $ wget http://emacs-ontology-project.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/radio.el
  --10:28:06--  http://emacs-ontology-project.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/radio.el
             => `radio.el'
  Resolving emacs-ontology-project.googlecode.com... 72.14.253.82
  Connecting to emacs-ontology-project.googlecode.com|72.14.253.82|:80... connected.
  HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 403 Forbidden
  10:28:07 ERROR 403: Forbidden.

  $ svn co http://emacs-ontology-project.googlecode.com/svn/trunk
  svn: PROPFIND request failed on '/svn/trunk'
  svn: Repository access denied.

The 403 response body (which wget unfortunately does not retrieve) was:

  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
  <D:error xmlns:D="DAV:" xmlns:m="http://apache.org/dav/xmlns" xmlns:C="svn:">
  <C:error/>
  <m:human-readable errcode="160000">
  Repository access denied.
  </m:human-readable>
  </D:error>