Re: Org Radio

[Bastien <bzg@altern.org>]

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