[emacs-wiki-discuss] Re: Planner and Diary

[Michael Olson]

John Sullivan <address@hidden> writes:

> Well, the convention described in the manual clearly allows for the
> format used by Luis.

You're right, John.  He can certainly make entries like that and have
them considered valid by Diary.  My apologies, Luís.

> It seems worth it to me to adjust things on the emacs-wiki end if
> that's possible.

If we look at fixing this from the Emacs Wiki side of things, one
possible solution would be to allow the user to denote lists starting
with " *".  It could cause problems if another asterisk appeared on
the line, though.  For example, if I did:

 * List item, Status: **important** (that word is bold)

Emacs Wiki might have a hard time knowing how to interpret that.

Another solution would be to finally implement sublists.  From an
initial perusal of the Muse code, it does not look as though you can
do sublists.  My first inclination is to have Emacs Wiki and Muse
recognize the following:

 - entry 1
 - entry 2
  + entry 2.1
   - entry 2.1.1
    + entry 2.1.1.1
    + entry 2.1.1.2
   - entry 2.1.2
  + entry 2.2
 - entry 3

Then the initial whitespace would probably have to be significant
since there would be no way to tell between a first-level and
third-level entry otherwise.  But doing so might cause some other
troubles in differentiating between lists and centered text.  Right
now, I don't even know if this is reasonably feasible in Emacs Wiki
and/or Muse.

Or to keep on this off-topic strand of thought, maybe sublists could
be marked up like so:

 - entry 1
 - entry 2
 | - entry 2.1
 | | - entry 2.1.1
 | | | - entry 2.1.1.1
 | | | - entry 2.1.1.2
 | | - entry 2.1.2
 | - entry 2.2
 - entry 3

Then whitespace wouldn't be as much of an issue.  It might conflict
with table handling though.  *sigh*.  Any suggestions/ideas concerning
this would be welcome.

> I don't use much of the mark-up myself though, so maybe there isn't
> a way to have it act differently when there is leading whitespace
> following a date specification in a diary file. But maybe there is?

Hmm, for that matter, if I use the fancy diary display with Planner,
the entry looks horrid when published because of the "=" characters.
That's something again that we could possibly change: make more than 4
"=" characters be interpreted as a horizontal line.  But this might
conflict with the verbatim markup, since it uses the "=" character.

Maybe the best solution in this case would be to have
(planner-diary-insinuate) surround each diary entry with "<example>"
and "</example>".  This is what I do for my notes when they are in a
form that Emacs Wiki could mangle.

If you like, I could incorporate that functionality and submit a patch
to Sacha.  I'm assuming that no one currently uses Emacs Wiki markup
in their diary files.  If they did, I'd make the functionality a
configurable option.