Re: LaTeX export of lists

[tsd@tsdye.com (Thomas S. Dye)]

Nicolas Goaziou <n.goaziou@gmail.com> writes:

> Hello,
>
> Eric S Fraga <e.fraga@ucl.ac.uk> writes:
>
>> Latex does have the concept of lists within paragraphs in that
>> paragraph boundaries are defined by blank lines.  So, if you have a
>> begin{itemize}...end{itemize} with no blank lines before and after, the
>> list implicitly is part of the enclosing paragraph.
>
> That's why I talked about "LaTeXism".
>
>> whether lists exported from org should automatically be within
>> paragraphs or not is unclear.
>
> For the record:
>
> From Org view, lists and paragraphs are distinct elements. More
> accurately, lists can hold paragraphs, but not the opposite.
>
> From LaTeX view, it's true that a list can belong to a paragraph. But,
> again, such a thing is impossible in HTML, in OpenDocument, where "the
> list is a paragraph-level element"[1], and in DocBook.
>
> So this is consistent with most of the exporters encountered in
> Org. Now, to provide compatibility with LaTeX, Org export system has to
> respect blank lines (or the absence thereof) in the buffer.
>
Aloha Nicolas,

I've just browsed the Document Structure chapter of the Org-mode manual:
paragraphs aren't mentioned!  

I've always indicated paragraph breaks in Org-mode with a blank line,
but I realize that this might just be a holdover from my long use of
LaTeX.  Are there other ways to indicate a paragraph break in Org-mode?

As for lists within paragraphs being a Latexism, I would say that the
other specs you cite appear to lack a structured way to accomplish
something that is, in fact, quite common in printed text.  There is
nothing wrong with leaving a common print structure like this
unstructured, but I find it very convenient to use a structured
approach, as provided by the paralist package in LaTeX.

I'm not trying to be pedantic here and hold out for the presence or
absence of blank lines to indicate a paragraph break in Org-mode.  For
the use case of lists set within a paragraph some other mechanism might
be more appropriate.

But this circles back to the more general question of how paragraphs are
indicated in Org-mode.  Is it the blank line alone, or the blank line and
other mechanisms?

All the best,
Tom

>
> Regards,
>
> [1] http://docs.oasis-open.org/office/v1.1/OS/OpenDocument-v1.1-html/OpenDocument-v1.1.html#4.3.Lists|outline

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