Hi all,

I've been using Org Mode for a while, and as long as things stay in
Emacs, things work just fine. But I still have problems when trying to
share my information with others or other devices -- especially in terms
of Calendar entries.

Below I have attached a (real) example of my trip to FSCONS in Sweden in
Org mode format. In agenda view, I see the following:

Friday      7 December 2007
 example:         10:40...... Flight SK 602 Zurich to Copenhagen --[2007-12-07 Fri 12:25]
 example:         14:10...... Flight SK 438 Copenhagen to Gothenburg --[2007-12-07 Fri 14:55]
 example:         Gothenburg, Sweden --[2007-12-09 Sun]
 example:         FSCONS conference --[2007-12-08 Sat]
Saturday    8 December 2007
 example:         17:15...... Speech at closing ceremony 
Sunday      9 December 2007
 example:         15:30...... Flight SK 439 Gothenburg to Copenhagen --[2007-12-09 Sun 16:15]
 example:         17:40...... Flight SK 609 Copenhagen to Zurich --[2007-12-09 Sun 19:25]

Note how I am using the inactive tags to delimit periods, which makes
sure that things covering more than one day (e.g. being in a city, or a
conference) only show up on their first day with information on when
they'll end.

This is pretty much how I like it.

Now I want to share this with another application or device, and do an
export to iCalendar. The resulting file is attached below.

The following things are immediately visible:

 - The "Gothenburg, Sweden" entry contains the end in the description,
   but in fact has a wrong end date (DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20071208).

   I would prefer this to have the correct end date, and not list it in
   the description for iCalendar export. If I change the second date tag
   to an active one, the end date/time is correct.

 - The description for "Gothenburg, Sweden" contains the flight as
   description, which is not very helpful.

 - The accomodation, which might make an interesting piece of
   description for the Gothenburg, Sweden entry is entirely missing from
   the iCalendar.

With the possible exception of the problem with defining periods with
inactive end time stamps, they are not necessarily what one would call
bugs of Org Mode, but rather issues resulting from the way the file is
structured.

Unfortunately I was unable to find any guidance about how to do this,
and did not find the time yet to look at the source code in order to see
how the iCalendar export is getting its information.

The question at hand is: How to improve the structure of the file, and
can we put this into the documentation so users get an idea of the
canonical structure for calendars in Org Mode?

I am aware that putting a rather open question is always a bit more
difficult, but hope that we'll still manage to find a solution.

Suggestions and hints appreciated.

Regards,
Georg