Re: New exporter, beamer confusion

[Rasmus <rasmus@gmx.us>]

James Harkins <jamshark70@gmail.com> writes:

> Btw, *who* preferred \alert? (Orwell, Politics and the English Language:
> "Never use the passive [voice] where you can use the active.")

I prefer alert.  See the Beamer manual (texdoc beamer in texlive) on
change of style and how to use alert (e.g. alert on one particular
(sub)slide of a "multipage slide").  It's the Beamer way.  Surely it
cannot be a bad thing?

> Still, I wonder if there is a way to make the new backend less unfriendly
> toward lists. It's an interesting philosophical question: In what cases is
> it better for the tool to adapt to the users' wishes, versus cases where
> the tool should encourage (Are blocks in the result actually better than
> lists? Who says so, and why should I take his or her word for it?)

Org has many dedicated list symbols namely white space and one of
{[-+*], [0-9][.)]}.  Why should a headline be converted to a list?  It
was always awkward to me.

I don't know how hard it would be to make the "default" block (of
level 3, say) a list block, but I guess that's ultimately what you
want?  Such a behavior shouldn't be the default, IMO, since a headline
is not a list.


> "Reasonably" for me would mean tweaking some configuration options and
> perhaps changing a few minor details of the markup. If you have to change
> the org document's structure (e.g., converting headlines to lists), it
> isn't backward compatible.

I'm sure it would be relatively quick to hack together a couple of
regexps and some lisp to do the conversion if you prefer to use the
new exporter.  E.g. find every occurrence of * in the beginning of the
line of length X and convert each occurrence to "-" with appropriate
white space (e.g. X + N).

What might be useful would be a tag telling Org to use the legacy
exporter on a file basis, although it would also be a short run
solution.

–Rasmus

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Summon the Mothership!