Re: Re: Limited #+INCLUDE ?

[Dan Davison <davison@stats.ox.ac.uk>]

Mark Elston <m_elston@comcast.net> writes:

> On 4/26/2010 12:40 PM, Dan Davison wrote:
>>
>> I'm considering investigating the following and would appreciate
>> comments on this idea. The aim is to make it easier to use Org-mode to
>> work pure code files which are *external to Org-mode* (i.e. this
>> proposal lies outside of the current org-babel tangling framework).
>>
>> - Extend Org file links to allow links to a range of lines in a
>>    file. The syntax could be
>>    [[file:/path/to/file::from::to][linkname]]
>>
>> - These links will bring up a buffer visiting the target file, narrowed
>>    to the target region.
>>
>> - The link back in the Org-mode file can be adjusted from the target
>>    file, by widening and then narrowing again. (During this procedure the
>>    target region would be highlighted.)
>>
>> - Export to HTML and LaTeX will have the ability to include the target
>>    regions, fontified according to the appropriate major-mode, similar to
>>    how begin_src blocks behave on export.
>>
>> - 'from' and 'to' could be line numbers, or regexps for text search.
>>
>> For programmers, this would allow a sort of org-mode mediated literate
>> programming in projects where it is not feasible/desirable to actually
>> include the source code in the org-mode file.
>>
>> Any comments or suggestions?
>>
>> Dan
>
> Dan,
>
> The use of line numbers seems a little error prone since line numbers
> can change dramatically by simply editing the file.  If you edit one
> section of a file, even if you update the line numbers for that
> section, you will need to search out all the *other* links to sections
> in that file and update them as well as they will become stale.  And,
> since it will be possible to have multiple org files with links into a
> single source file, this will be a *very* difficult thing to manage.

Hi Mark,

>
> Your idea about regexps sounds promising, though.

My current thought is that Emacs bookmarks might be the technology to
use here. They seem to be designed for this task (saving a reference to
a location in a file which is robust to mild file alteration), they are
almost 20 years old, and there is already org-bookmarks.el in contrib by
Tokuya Kameshima[1].

(info "(emacs) Bookmarks")

>  You could define
> 'markers' in comments delimiting the relevant sections of code and
> org could search these out easily enough.

My hope was to avoid forcing the target files to receive extra
Org-related content. E.g. suppose that the target files are a
collaborative project involving non-Org users that is under version
control; one wouldn't want to commit those special tags, and one
wouldn't particularly want to have to filter them out them when making
commits.

Dan

[1] I haven't looked into this properly, but to avoid staleness one
possibility would be to modify Tokuya's links to actually include the
lisp form defining the bookmark (i.e. the entry in bookmark-alist) in
the non-visible portion of the link (?). My proposed range links would
employ two bookmarks.




>
> Mark
>
>
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