Dear all, I'm a new org user who recently ran across the video of Carsten's Google talk. I have been looking for something like org for years, but learning Emacs had always seemed too high a price, so I never really considered Emacs-based options. However time is a teacher, and I see now that there are plenty of other higher prices than learning Emacs, which has anyway proved easier than I thought. Org-mode is really an amazing piece of work, a highly original piece of software, and possibly just what this vim user needs. When I think how much time I spent other solutions, including vim's two (basically unmaintained and functionally feeble) outline modes, I can only resign myself to the mild shame.
The following is in response to a brief thread posted to this list in October by Matthew Lundin. He described the limitations of footnotes.el, and suggested two possibilities for extending footnotes support in org-mode. [1]. The problem with Steve L. Baur's (otherwise useful) footnotes mode is that it cannot 'read' the contents of a loaded buffer. So in any given editing session, footnote numbering always starts with 1, even if you already had 1...10 in your file from a previous editing session. This is simply a limitation of the mode in its current state. I expect the package's scope was originally confined to using footnotes in plain text emails, which are generally finished in one shot. There have been some efforts to overcome this limitation by means of a patch to footnote.el [2] and a new function, footnote-init.el [3] which reads the contents of a newly loaded buffer so that the patched footnote.el 'knows' about previously placed footnotes. These particular patches may not have all the kinks worked out, however,[4] and are not part of the current CVS of Emacs 23. But someone working in Muse did write an interesting extension to Muse's footnote support. (The extension is explained here [5], and the revised version of the code is here [6]). It is basically a hook function which converts footnotes with reference names[fn:named_note] to plain, numbered footnotes, like Muse and org-mode support. It operates on a temporary buffer just before export to LaTeX or HTML, so is transparent to the user. I too would like to make use of org-mode to do more extensive footnoting than the current footnote.el easily allows. I'm not sure of the best solution. Here are the alternatives I can think of: 1. Help Baur's footnotes.el get to the point where it has no trouble with multiple editing sessions and managing the numbering of any arbitrary quantity of footnotes. This is possible in theory. But I suspect that footnotes associated with body text by simple Arabic numerals are pretty easy to mangle in a simple text system that lets you do arbitrary things with the text. Comments? 2. Adapt the Muse code mentioned above for use with org-mode. This would keep org-mode's current footnote support unchanged, but allow named footnotes while writing. Carsten suggested something like this in his response to Matthew. 3. Add named footnote support to org-mode according to Matthew's second suggestion (similar to footnote functionality in Pandoc, Multi-Markdown or ReST). This could optionally include a function for the auto-generation of short (?) unique-ish IDs to use instead of names (in a long document, giving named references to dozens of similar footnotes could itself be a source of confusion). 4. Forget org-mode for anything with any quantity of footnotes. This is Carsten's other suggestion in response to Matthew. It's possible that the practicalities of footnote handling would prove too costly to get right. He knows this much better than I. (though I'm not sure that they impair org's plan-text readability as Carsten suggests. 5. A final solution (which might also gain other advantages) could be to begin to facilitate an org-export mode to Pandoc's native plain-text syntax (an extension of Markdown).[7] Pandoc is a robust Haskell engine to convert between plain text formats. This would add a step to org-mode export, but that one step could potentially allow conversion into the wide range of formats that Pandoc supports (markdown, reStructuredText, HTML, LaTeX, ConTeXt, RTF, DocBook XML, OpenDocument XML, ODT, GNU Texinfo, MediaWiki markup, groff man pages, and S5 HTML slide shows). Pandoc's syntax model already has a lot in common with org's. (Both allow LaTeX pass-through, for example). I don't know if such an export would meet the effort vs. value trade off, but I suggest it might. Comments? (by anyone who summoned the patience to read all of that... sorry for the length. I couldn't manage less). Scot B. Footnotes: [1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.orgmode/8373 [2] http://groups.google.com/group/gnu.emacs.sources/browse_thread/thread/49c826201105d1e9/7c3ea8323041f91c?lnk=gst&q=footnote#7c3ea8323041f91c [3] http://groups.google.com/group/gnu.emacs.sources/browse_thread/thread/e809fa5d396a7aa2/1d001b35388725b4?lnk=gst&q=footnote#1d001b35388725b4 [4] http://osdir.com/ml/emacs.muse.general/2007-11/msg00012.html [5] https://mail.gna.org/public/muse-el-discuss/2007-11/msg00027.html [6] https://mail.gna.org/public/muse-el-discuss/2007-11/msg00033.html [namednote] Like this. [7] http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/ _______________________________________________ Emacs-orgmode mailing list Remember: use `Reply All' to send replies to the list. Emacs-orgmode@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacs-orgmode
