I can't say anything about indentation (I encounter problems that I have not reported because of lack of time to investigate combined with laziness - but I suspect they are, partly at least, of my own making).
But when I do `<e TAB' inside a block, I get a properly quoted (though badly indented) example block, with commas before the #+begin and the #+end_example lines - OTOH, `<e TAB' outside a block gives me a no-indent example block even if I have spaces before the `<e' - if I have printable charactes before the `<e', it does not get expanded: --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8--- #+NAME: third #+begin_src org - an item - subitem ,#+begin_example ,#+end_example #+end_src #+begin_example #+end_example --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8--- The commas are important: are you not getting them? -- Nick "There are only two hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors." -Martin Fowler