Tweaking the export (was: Re: [ANN] ASCII back-end for new export engine)

[Christian Wittern <cwittern@gmail.com>]

Hi Nicolas, hello everybody,

I am extremely excited about this new export engine; it seems to fill a need 
I have felt for quite a while now.  What I need it for is the following:

For the last couple of years, I have used org-mode more and more for working 
with and translating texts from classical Chinese.  Over time, some special 
conventions have crept in, like the fact that I like (for the draft 
translation) to work in a way that has a short chunk of Chinese text on the 
left and, separated by a <tab> character, the translation of that piece 
following on the same line (there are other special conventions like 
specialized drawers etc., but I don't need to discuss these here now.)

While this is setup is extremely pleasant to work with, at some point I need 
to separate these two parts in separate texts; the stuff to the left of the 
<tab> has to go into one file, the stuff to the right to some other file, 
while at the same time merging the chunks of texts into paragraphs.   Now 
for quite some while if have thought about how to automate that, but until 
now, I have usually done it by hand with a couple of regex search-and-replace.

Now, with the new export engine, it looks like all I would need to do would 
be to tweak the way paragraphs are handled, while leaving the rest intact, 
some kind of org to org transform that simply tweaks one single aspect of 
the text.  However, I am a bit baffled on where to start with this.  I would 
be glad if you or somebody else could give me some pointers at how to tackle 
this problem.  (And please be kind, since my elisp fu is pretty 
insignificant:-(  )

All the best,

Christian Wittern, Kyoto