[O] [Feature Request] Make property-drawers exportable

[Thorsten Jolitz]

Hi List,

for me property-drawers are a very useful feature of Org-mode, since
the need to store meta-data for a document is so frequent and
property-drawers are human- and machine-readable, easy to handle
interactively and programmatically, and avoid all that nasty redundancy
and accidental variation of giving meta-data as free text.

However, property-drawers are not exported except separating blank
lines. This is a real pity in my eyes, since parts of an Org-mode
document that can't be exported are visible only to the author of the
document and a few fellows that use the raw Org document too. This might
make sense in some cases, but in others the property information should
be visible in the exported docs too.

I don't really consider the export options (#+TITLE, #+AUTHOR etc) as a
replacement for property drawers, in some situations I would like to use
property drawers and see them exported.

So here is my feature request, at least for the most important backends
ASCII, HTML and LATEX: add a function for property drawer export and an
export option to turn on/off this export.

PS
the status-quo of property-drawer export at the moment:

1. backends that (seem to) deal with property drawers:
,---------------------------------------------------------------------------
| 3 matches for "property-drawer" in buffer: ox-html.el
|      83:    (property-drawer . org-html-property-drawer)
|    2893:(defun org-html-property-drawer (property-drawer contents info)
|    2894:  "Transcode a PROPERTY-DRAWER element from Org to HTML.
|
| 3 matches for "property-drawer" in buffer: ox-odt.el
|      66:    (property-drawer . org-odt-property-drawer)
|    3017:(defun org-odt-property-drawer (property-drawer contents info)
|    3018:  "Transcode a PROPERTY-DRAWER element from Org to ODT.
|
| 1 match for "property-drawer" in buffer: ox-org.el
|      91:    (property-drawer . org-org-identity)
|
| 3 matches for "property-drawer" in buffer: ox-texinfo.el
|      96:    (property-drawer . org-texinfo-property-drawer)
|    1399:(defun org-texinfo-property-drawer (property-drawer contents info)
|    1400:  "Transcode a PROPERTY-DRAWER element from Org to Texinfo.
`---------------------------------------------------------------------------

but in all cases (except ox-org.el) the function looks like this:

,---------------------------------------------------------------------
| (defun org-html-property-drawer (property-drawer contents info)
|   "Transcode a PROPERTY-DRAWER element from Org to HTML.
| CONTENTS is nil.  INFO is a plist holding contextual
| information."
|   ;; The property drawer isn't exported but we want separating blank
|   ;; lines nonetheless.
|   "")
`---------------------------------------------------------------------

2. backends that don't (really) deal with property drawers:
,---------------------------------------------------------
| 1 match for "property-drawer" in buffer: ox-man.el
|      83:    (property-drawer . (lambda (&rest args) ""))
|
| 1 match for "property-drawer" in buffer: ox-latex.el
|      70:    (property-drawer . (lambda (&rest args) ""))
|
| ox-ascii.el: not found
| ox-icalendar.el: not found
| ox-md.el: not found
`---------------------------------------------------------

--
cheers,
Thorsten