Re: Feature request: lists with letters

[Titus von der Malsburg <malsburg@posteo.de>]

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On 2017-02-02 Thu 17:55, Nicolas Goaziou wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Titus von der Malsburg <malsburg@posteo.de> writes:
>
>> Items in lists can start with -, +, N), or N. (with N being an
>> integer).  It’s currently not possible, to use letters as in the
>> following examples:
>>
>> a. First item
>> b. Second item
>>
>> or
>>
>> a) First item
>> b) Second item
>>
>> I believe it would make sense to allow letters in org-mode because
>> that’s a very common way to label items in lists.  I know that this has
>> been discussed previously but to my knowledge there was no
>> resolution.  The counter argument against letters was that we wouldn’t
>> know what labels to use when there are more items than letters, but I
>> think this shouldn’t stop us.  Reasons:
>>
>> a) Most lists have fewer items and cases where more than 26 labels are
>>    needed are rare.
>> b) If a list has more than 26 items, the user is free to switch to
>>    bullet points or numbers.
>> c) The limited number of letters hasn’t stopped people from using
>>    letters in many other contexts.  For example, LaTeX offers letters
>>    and people think it’s useful.
>> d) Similarly, people often use Roman numerals (e.g., iv.) although
>>    they also quickly become impractical (999 = CMXCIX).
>> e) In some (academic) contexts, e.g. in linguistics, letters are
>>    conventionally used to label items in lists.
>> f) Letters worked perfectly fine in this list.
>>
>> As to the question what org mode should do if a list is two long for
>> letters: Here are two possible solutions:
>>
>> a) Label all items beyond the 26th with z, to make it visually very
>>    salient that there are not enough letters.
>> b) Start over from letter a after z.
>> c) Count in base 26 using letters as digits: a … z aa … az ba … bz …
>>
>> Personally, I would prefer solution c because it gives each item a
>> unique label to which we can refer.  But solutions a and b would be ok,
>> too.  It doesn’t really matter because this is just an uninteresting
>> edge case and we shouldn’t obsess about it when the default case (<=26
>> items) is complete unproblematic.
>>
>> Thanks for considering this proposal.
>
> This proposal was implemented exactly 6 years ago. See
> `org-list-allow-alphabetical'.
>
> They introduce false positives, so they are not allowed by default.
> Also, they probably should be implemented visually (i.e., with overlays,
> à la `org-bullets') not syntactically. Anyway, here they are.

Great, and thanks for the response.  I had actually checked the
documentation but it’s very easy to overlook the footnote in which this
is mentioned.

One issue with org-list-allow-alphabetical is that we get numbers
instead of letters when we export to HTML and LaTeX.  I saw the earlier
thread [0] that gives the reasoning for this but I find it
unsatisfying.  If Org allows us to distinguish between -, +, 1., 1), a.,
A., a), A), this should also be honored by the exporter.  Otherwise it’s
rather pointless to allow that distinction in the first place.

IMHO, a clean solution would be to either drop everything but - and
1. or to keep all these and make the exporters honor them.  The former
would breaks existing documents and is therefore out of the
question.  This leaves us with the second solution.

Any chance you are willing to reconsider the decision to ignore
allow-alphabetical during export?  I think it would be very useful to
have that.  I know there are other ways to get alphabetical bullets in
exported documents but they are all specific to certain export targets
and the beauty of Org mode is precisely that we can export to many
different targets.

Thank you for your work on Org mode.  I use it for everything and
without it, I just wouldn’t know what to do.

  Titus

[0] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-orgmode/2013-06/msg00221.html

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