Re: Macro expansion in new exporter

[tftorrey@tftorrey.com (T.F. Torrey)]

Hello Nicolas,

Thank you for your thoughtful clarification about macros in the new
exporter.  Probably in the long run I will find happiness using babel
for what I want to do.  In the meantime, however, I have a few more
questions:

1. You wrote before that macros were scaled back because what they did
could be done by babel.  Is that really a good reason for removing
functionality?  Everything that Org does could be done in other tools,
and yet ... we have Org.

2. You wrote to Carsten that macros could no longer contain newlines.
That seems like an arbitrary limitation.  Is it?

3. Is there really a reason why macro expansion is limited to a few
keywords rather than all?  Who would that trip up?  Ditto for verbatim
and code emphasis.

4. Given that macro values are easy to find in the source document, and
unexpanded macros are easy to find in the output document, couldn't I
just add a filter to the exporter to find and expand any unexpanded
macros (and lingering newline indicators)?  Is there an easy method for
adding such a filter?

5. Actually, why do macros need to be an exporter problem at all?
Couldn't the macro functionality be put into a separate package that
used hooks and filters to connect itself into the export routine and the
various back-ends (if even necessary)?  Then macros could be made to do
interesting things without burdening the export engine (and its
maintainer) at all.

Thanks again for your amazing work.

Best regards,
Terry
-- 
T.F. Torrey