Re: [PATCH] Export: Override headline numbering via properties

[Nicolas Goaziou <n.goaziou@gmail.com>]

Hello,

Mark Edgington <edgimar@gmail.com> writes:

> A couple possible use-cases:
>
> 1. a document (or chapter of a document) where the first  headline
> contains general "introduction" information explaining what the rest
> of the document (chapter) is about (similar to an abstract, but not
> identical -- something that might contain sub-headings, lists, tables,
> etc.), and the remainder of the document (chapter) is the "real"
> content of the document -- the place where you want the numbering to
> begin.

You can still number these parts manually with, e.g.,

  #+latex: \section*{Introduction}

before the first section in your Org document.

> 2. a document where only one of the headlines and its child-headlines
> halfway through the document should be un-numbered (maybe they
> represent an "example docoument" embedded within an
> instruction-manual).

I may be wrong, but this sounds like a hypothetical use case to me.

Anyway, your patch will not work on back-ends that rely on Org to
compute section numbers (e.g., ascii, html...) because even if you
ignore numbering for a particular headline, it still adds up internally.
IOW, you also need to patch `org-export--collect-headline-numbering'.

But that's not quite it, yet. Some back-ends (e.g., html) use that
internal number as a unique identifier for the headline. Actually, the
"artificial restriction" you are talking about is a way to allow every
headline to be numbered in a unique way, even if that number doesn't
appear in the output.

Therefore, you need to generate a unique identifier for all headlines,
a function to return it, and modify each back-end accordingly. This is
obviously doable, but it cannot fit in a TINYPATCH.

Since I wouldn't use this, I can hardly judge, but I would appreciate
some feedback from other users before we go too far in the
implementation.


Regards,

-- 
Nicolas Goaziou