On Fri, 04 Jun 2010 17:42:59 -0600, "Eric Schulte" <schulte.eric@gmail.com> wrote:

[...]

> > The only thing missing is a little sketch tool in Emacs, fast enough
> > to be used while taking notes... :-)
> >
> 
> I often use ditaa or example blocks with artist mode when I'm taking
> notes, but the use of artist mode isn't quite "natural" -- although I
> doubt you could do any better encoding sketches in plain text.

Carsten,

I also use ditaa with artist although it's not the most pleasant
experience unfortunately.  I find artist mode very useful but also
rather idiosyncratic at times...  

More importantly, there are some issues with the interaction between
org-mode and artist diagrams, specifically that org-mode sometimes
interprets artist diagrams as tables (e.g. if you have a vertical line
as the first non-whitespace character on every line of the diagram,
something that often happens when drawing a graph, say.  Once org-mode
has decided that the diagram is actually an org table, editing in
source mode no longer works.

For instance, the following diagram (something to do with heat
exchanger networks, if you really want to know ;-) is interpreted as a
table:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
#+begin_src ditaa :file test.png :result file
    |
    | ------------>
    |		  
    |		  
    | <---------
    |	       
    |	       
    |	  ----------->
    |
    |
#+end_src
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

There is, of course, an easy way out which is to type any character
other than a | as the first non-whitespace character of the first
line...

I guess org-mode should not be interpreting anything between begin_src
and end_src lines?

Anyway, not a serious issue as there's an easy workaround but I
thought I'd highlight it.