[Orgmode] Re: macros: escaping "," and comments

[Shelagh Manton]

On Fri, 13 Aug 2010 00:02:09 +0200, Stefan Vollmar wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> we are currently changing our institute's web site so that staff members
> can have a personal page: they can submit Org-mode files which are then
> automatically converted to (rather nice) HTML pages. One advantage is
> that this allows us to give staff members a lot of freedom to create
> content while keeping a "corporate identity" look (and getting the
> director's permission in the first place).
> 
> Our template needs a macro in the org template to create a more "fancy"
> summary of personal information with a table, a portrait and some icons
> (aside: please note that you can create really complex HTML code this
> way if necessary).
> 
> Here is a very simple example:
>  
> #+title: test
> #+macro: mhead #+html: <table><tr><td> email: $1</td><td> phone:
> $2</td></tr></table>
> 
> {{{mhead(
> address@hidden,
> 1-234-2134
> )}}}
> 
> Imagine more lines (job description, fax, homepage, etc) and a more
> complex table (hidden in a setup file). Having users provide information
> in this way is not ideal, but has worked surprisingly well (the rest of
> the template is "proper" Org-mode content).
> 
> When creating the Org templates we ran into these problems with Org-mode
> 7.01 and Emacs 23.2.1:
> 
> (1) How can we escape "," in the macro call? Ideally, we would need
> something like this:
> 
> {{{mhead(
> one entry\, still the same entry,
> the second variable...
> 
> (2) It would be nice to use something like this:
> 
> {{{mhead(
> # Email
> address@hidden,
> # Phone
> 1-234-2134
> )}}}
> 

What would be really nifty would be to turn this kind of thing into 
microformats. 

http://microformats.org/

How hard would that be?




> However, the "#" lines are currently not ignored (as comments) when
> expanding the macro, these kind of comment lines would be helpful when
> providing templates in general.
> 
> (3) if, in the above example, we delete the #+title line before the
> macro definition, that macro stops working (the macro definition is not
> interpreted as such). It seems there must be at least one line with
> arbitraty contents before the macro definition (bug?).
> 
> I think, that (1) (maybe it is already possible - apologies if I
> overlooked something) and (2) would be useful features in Org-mode.
> 
> Many thanks in advance for any help with this.
> 
> Warm regards,
>  Stefan


Cheers

Shelagh