[O] Re: Continuation of main section text after subsections ?

[William Gardella]

Marcel van der Boom <address@hidden> writes:

> On zo 27-mrt-2011 16:52
> Cian <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>> You can't do that, as it would be akin to trying to have in a book
>> 
>> Section 1
>> Stuff
>> Section 1.1.1
>> More stuff
>> 
>> Now this goes under Section 1
>> 
>> Not really an idiom that makes sense (I find its best to think of
>> org-mode's headings as chapter headers
>
> Agreed, for paper books that would not make much sense (depending on
> how you do it) and that fact kept me from asking the question for a
> while. 
> For electronic texts however, especially in the drafting stage where
> (sub-)sections get shuffled around, promoted, demoted, split etc. it
> does make sense, to me at least.
>
> When writing I tend to think about org headings as 'handles' to a
> logical block of information, including its child blocks. Apparently my
> analogy clashes with what org-mode wants. I had my hopes on a
> customization option. 
>
> Is there a strong reason this could not work as an option in org-mode?
>
> marcel

Marcel,

I think this is not yet easily possible in org-mode due to the
limitations of org's rather simple concept of markup.  Because org tries
to stay out of the way of the user's choice of indentation flow, for
example, whitespace can't be used to indicate that your text has
returned to the top level after entering a subheading.  And unlike in,
e.g., HTML or LaTeX, there's no way of "closing" the subheading
environment explicitly.

As Cian suggests, some alternatives you can use are to employ drawers or
environments such as #+BEGIN_NOTE.

I also use Org as a drafting tool, mostly for documents that will end up
as papers or legal documents rendered with LaTeX.  There are a few
ambiguities in the markup that are hard to resolve without going the
additional step of exporting to HTML or LaTeX and editing that output.
You've just stumbled into one of them...

I'd support some kind of fix, but it'd be moderately to very involved
and far beyond my level of comfort with Elisp.  I also agree that it'd
be hard to specify.

-- 
William Gardella
J.D. Candidate
Class of 2011, University of Pittsburgh School of Law