Dear Orgmoders, Today I would like to poll the collective wisdom of the Orgmode user community about a design question I have.
Since discovering org-mode more than 9.5 years ago (yeah! ), it has transformed my life almost as much, maybe even more than Emacs itself. Among other things, for work I have developed a package called Mandoku, which uses the org-mode format to deal with (classical) Chinese text. For those interested, a description of this format, which is 99% org-mode is here[1]. Now, as described at the very end of that page, I allow users to maintain annotations to things on the previous line of text in drawers. I then have scripts to collect these annotations and do various interesting things with them. Now, since I started doing this some 6+ years ago, the org-mode syntax has seen some changes and especially blocks seem much more advanced now. I would like to have more expressive power concerning the content of the annotations, so I am considering switching to a block format for these annotations (or more likely for the time being, supporting both). This would give me more metadata and control over the content, because I can have header lines etc. However, my audience is somewhat non-technical and they concentrate on reading the texts, so the intrusion has to be minimal. Currently I handle that with the drawers being mostly folded and only expanded on demand with a <tab> key on the line as usual, that is also the reason to use a short word for the drawer, which is the only thing seen in the folded state. So this does not work so nicely with blocks, especially if the header line expands. Ideally I would even like to avoid seeing the header line in folded state and just have an icon in the margin to indicate that there is an annotation. Does anybody know how this can be done? Has anybody done something similar? Apart from that, I wonder if there are other things to consider in the question: Should I move to block syntax rather than staying with drawers? Any and all comments appreciated, Christian Wittern [1] http://www.mandoku.org/mandoku-format-en.html -- Christian Wittern, Kyoto