Re: [PATCH] A proposal to add LaTeX attributes to verse blocks

[Tim Cross]

Timothy <tecosaur@gmail.com> writes:

> Eric S Fraga <e.fraga@ucl.ac.uk> writes:
>
>> Is the verse package loaded automatically already?  I did not see any
>> change in the patch to that aspect and when I export a simple test, the
>> package is not loaded.
>
> Wouldn't it be nice if there was something in-between loading the
> kitchen sink and manually adding packages*... [ foreshadowing ;) ]

Will be interesting to see what you are 'foreshadowing'.

Personally, I find the current options pretty flexible with
'org-latex-classes and support for the macro like placeholders
[PACKAGES, DEFAULT_PACKAGES, EXTRA and their negators] and the ability
to add packages with LATEX_HEADER and LATEX_HEADER_EXTRA file options.
I'm often quite surprised how little people seem to take advantage of
'org-latex-classes and the LATEX_CLASS; file option to define custom
document formats. You can easily define an 'empty' class which only
includes packages you add with LATEX_HEADER: or LATEX_HEADER_EXTRA for
example. 

It is with 'tweaking' Latex packages I've seen people get into trouble.
There can often be some unexpected results when you fail to load or load
packages in a different order. Testing is notoriously difficult as you
also need a lot of different test input data to get good coverage and
adequately test the impact changes to loaded Latex packages causes.
Without detailed knowledge of the latex based exporters, it isn't always
obvious how/where specific Latex packages are used. It would be
important to ensure any mechanism designed to make it easier to
customize what packages are loaded that we don't also end up generating
more bug rports about broken export formatting. 

-- 
Tim Cross