Re: [Out-of-Thread] Re: [RFC] Org syntax (draft)

[Aaron Ecay <aaronecay@gmail.com>]

Hi Carsten,

Thank you for your very insightful thoughts.  I would like to make one note.

2013ko martxoak 18an, Carsten Dominik-ek idatzi zuen:

> Now to the discussion with Z about additional emphasis definitions
> which he/she uses for custom highlighting of stuff.  Right now this
> relies on modifying the emph-alist variable.  However, for the purpose
> of in-buffer only highlighting, it is not necessary to go through
> parser-sensitive code.  You can do this simply with additions to
> font-lock, for example using font-lock-add-keywords or something like
> this, see also Thorsten's post.  If someone wants, I can provide an
> example for Z's case, and we could encapsulate such behavior into a
> little library in contrib, to make it easy to configure such behavior.
> Compromising the parser for this application is not necessary.

I use org to write articles which discuss words in foreign languages.
These need to be distinctively typeset (in italics), and sometimes need
to be set in a special font with coverage for exotic characters.  I
would find it very useful to be able to define special emphasis
environments for these words.  Using macros feels too much like writing
LaTeX (which I use org to avoid having to write directly, as much as
possible...)

I see the goal of the syntactic standardization as making it easier to
operate with non-emacs tools; as Nicolas said:

> My point of view is the following: Org (as a format) definition
> shouldn't depend on Emacs. It should be totally parseable by any
> language (which is not the case actually, since syntax relies on
> variables defined in Emacs). IOW, we should work to make it a real
> plain-text markup format.

Personally, I am OK with articles I have written for export never being
able to be read by non-emacs tools (as opposed to other uses of org as a
database/schedule/agenda, where the ability to access the information in
other programs/programming languages would be useful).  I sympathize
with the goal of making the format accessible to other tools, but I also
think the ability to have within emacs additional flexibility
wrt. formatting (for both display and export) is worth preserving.

-- 
Aaron Ecay