[O] Re: unnumbered subsections in latex export

[Matt Lundin]

Eric S Fraga <address@hidden> writes:

> Jambunathan K <address@hidden> writes:
>
> [...]
>
>> I think one of the reasons Org is so popular it is that it is a
>> common-man's swiss army knife and not a elitist samurai sword.
>
> And I think this is a very important analogy.  Org does a good job for
> many (very different) tasks.  The price is that it does not necessarily
> do some of those tasks as well as could be.
>
> I am happy to put with the rough edges exposed by the exporters because
> of what the whole package provides.  Case in point: I submitted a paper
> yesterday which I wrote in org.  However, for the submission, once I was
> happy with all the content, I had to tweak the latex to meet the
> journal's format because they provide a style file which requires title,
> author, etc. to come *after* the \begin{document}.  

I agree that the org-exporter currently does its job very well. The
astounding utility of org-mode is ample proof of the value of releasing
early; even if the exporter is not as elegant as a modern compiler, it
works. :)

That said, I very much support Nicolas' proposal. Right now, the issue
is not so much the end user's experience as it is the ease of
maintaining and developing the backends. We obviously don't want org to
be as strict as xml --- i.e., the a new export parser should be somewhat
forgiving. But a more abstract approach would make it easier to build
new backends or fix bugs that effect all of the backends. One might even
develop an org backend -- i.e., export functions that take the data
produced by the parser and spit out an Org-mode syntax. One might then
write importers that parse other types of files (mediawiki, markdown,
latex, etc.) and return the data structure expected by org-exp.el. Of
course, this latter possibility may not be necessary, given that pandoc
can already convert to org files. :)

Best,
Matt