Re: Should comments break paragraphs?

[Nicolas Goaziou <n.goaziou@gmail.com>]

Bastien <bzg@gnu.org> writes:

> Nicolas Goaziou <n.goaziou@gmail.com> writes:
>> And the direction is wrong... Parsing shouldn't modify the buffer being
>> parsed, ever. But you can use a hook for that purpose.
>
> I didn't suggest that parsing should modify the before: I said "where
> comments are deleted before parsing and exporting".
>
> There should be an easy solution for that.

Yes, a hook, as I suggested:

  (defun my-comment-removal (backend)
    (delete-matching-lines "^[ \t]*#\\( \\|$\\)"))
  (add-hook 'org-export-before-parsing-hook 'my-comment-removal)

I maintain it is dangerous to make it a default (or even make it easier
than that) because it will cause a discrepancy between the real buffer
contents and what is really parsed. It can create strange things,
really.

> I didn't suggest to redefine comments.

Of course you did. You said comments should be available anywhere but in
source blocks, didn't you? It isn't possible without redefining them in
Org.

>> You have to change every part of Org that
>> assumes there will be no comment in its way (lists, agenda, babel,
>> parser and probably more I can't think of).
>>
>> If it's an HTML/ODT export issue, it's far easier to patch the export
>> back-ends instead. 10 lines of code in each one, maybe.
>
> This is a general pre-export issue, it does not depend on the
> exporters themselves.

What you want here is to give comments a special meaning just before
export, even though they don't have it otherwise. As an example, you can
remove the comment here just before export:

  text
  # comment
  text

but `org-element-at-point' will still see two paragraphs and a comment
between them nonetheless.

But, IIUC, the problem the OP wants to solve is different: he wants the
example above to be treated as a paragraph, not as two of them. In fact
this is more about paragraphs than comments (i.e. paragraphs definition
in targeted back-ends is different than Org's).

> So again, what prevents us to make it easy for users to treat comments
> as no-line before parsing and exporting?

It is already easy, see hook above. Nothing prevents you from making it
easier. But this is wrong.


Regards,

-- 
Nicolas Goaziou