you can put some kind of prefix on like this:

* intro to a section
  :PROPERTIES:
  :ID:       intro-to-a:0f141497-f3ad-488a-b8c9-0a5c3ea53ba0
  :END:

#+BEGIN_SRC emacs-lisp
(defun get-my-id ()
  "create an org-id with prefix based on headline"
  (let ((s))
    (setq s
      (replace-regexp-in-string
       " " "-"
       (nth 4 (org-heading-components))))
    (org-id-get
     (point)
     t
     (substring
      s
      0
      (if (> (length s) 10) 10
    (length s))))))

(get-my-id)
#+END_SRC

#+RESULTS:
: intro-to-a:0f141497-f3ad-488a-b8c9-0a5c3ea53ba0



John

-----------------------------------
John Kitchin
Associate Professor
Doherty Hall A207F
Department of Chemical Engineering
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
412-268-7803
http://kitchingroup.cheme.cmu.edu



On Sun, Feb 2, 2014 at 12:10 PM, Ken Mankoff <mankoff@gmail.com> wrote:

>
> Yes that is a fairly simple and obvious solution.
>
>   -k.
>
> On Sun, 2 Feb 2014, Daniel Clemente wrote:
>
>
>> Have you tried changing the strange ID to the ID that you want? (e.g.
>> 7f3b531b-f1c9-41aa-854b-37235500495f → introduction). They should be
>> unique. I use my manually written IDs for some important headers which I
>> want to detect from outside org. In addition there's CUSTOM_ID, but I think
>> that's the id="…" you want in HTML exports.
>>
>>
>> El Sat, 1 Feb 2014 14:39:15 -0500 (EST) Ken Mankoff va escriure:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> I've never cared that the ID field was not human friendly.
>>>
>>> But I've just learned about the Estimate Table where you can see your
>>> estimates
>>> and actual clock time to complete tasks. If you want to see the
>>> estimates for
>>> the current tree, you need to know the ID, which is not human friendly.
>>>
>>> It seems like with IDO mode, the first few characters or words of the
>>> title,
>>> stripped of whitespace, could be pre- or ap- pended onto the ID, and
>>> then it
>>> would be easy to select IDs. If this were how IDs were created, would
>>> this break
>>> some other features? Do others see this as a good or bad thing? Or is
>>> there some
>>> other way to tell the Estimate Table to work on the local tree.
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>>
>>>   -k.
>>>
>>>
>>
>
>