Re: [PATCH] ox-koma-letter.el: Add support for section

[Daniele Pizzolli <dan@toel.it>]

On Sat, Jan 02 2016, Rasmus  wrote:

> Hi Daniele,
>
> First, thanks for your patch.
>
> Daniele Pizzolli <dan@toel.it> writes:
>
>> I was really surprised that headlines, that are so common in org-mode
>> are discarded by default in ox-koma-letter.
>
> Why?  They are not supported by scrlttr2.cls, except if you download an
> extra lco file, not distributed via CTAN.  As such, I don’t think it
> should be supported by ox-koma-letter.el.

Hello Rasmus,

thanks for you comment.  I try to explain my point of view better.  Now
the export to letter silently discard the headings text in the exported
tex.  This is quite bad, even if documented.  As a user I want to change
quite easily the export backend (text, latex, beamer, ...)  while
retaining most of my work.  Every backend as it's own supported
features, but discarding the input provided by the user does not provide
the best user experience to me.

By the way this patch does not change the final output, if there is no
section.lco available.  So there should be no regression and only
improvements.

I really prefer something that instead of discarding the user input
rewrite it to fit the backend features (if there is no heading/section
support, use something like the start of paragraph, and support section
only if enabled by the user) but this is beyond my coding abilities in
elisp, so I sent the minimal working patch with the minimal impact on
existing behaviour.

> A general headline property that allows to insert arbitrary code right
> before a headline (such as "@@latex:\clearpage@@") might be a more
> fruitful approach.

I guess this is another story.

>> +Add [sections] to LATEX_CLASS_OPTIONS with:
>> +
>> +#+LATEX_CLASS_OPTIONS: [sections]
>> +
>> +If section.lco is unavaliable the section are exported in the tex
>> +source but not rendered in the final pdf.
>
> Whether section.lco is available or not is a complicated question.  You
> first need to figure out what is the tex distribution (what if it’s not in
> PATH) and whether section.lco is available via something like kpsewhich.
> Note that e.g. TL also looks in the current path.

I use org to touch as less latex as possible, I just downloaded the
section.lco and put in the same directory of my org file and everything
was working.  A little before I used apt-file search section.lco but
since nothing was found I quickly reverted to the manual download.  I
wish that everything is packaged as distro package, but I can survive
some manual work.

Best,
Daniele