Re: [O] New exporter, beamer confusion

[James Harkins]

On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 3:21 PM, Nick Dokos <address@hidden> wrote:
> I added a beamer entry to org-e-latex-classes as indicated in
>
>   http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.orgmode/61497/focus=61536
>
> (again, I
> have no idea if the sectioning stuff matters or not, and whether it leads
> to problems - improvements/corrections would be welcome):

Made no difference for me.

> Customizing org-e-beamer-environments-extra should do the trick.  I was
> experimenting using the *scratch* buffer, so the following are temporary
> settings, cribbed from those experiments: restart emacs and they
> disappear.
>
> Something like the following perhaps (very lightly tested - nb: I really
> haven't played with the new exporter very much at all):
>
> --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
> (setq blockenv '("block" "b" "\\begin{itemize}\\item %h" "\\end{itemize}"))
> (add-to-list 'org-e-beamer-environments-extra blockenv t)
> --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

I'm attaching an org file that illustrates a couple of the beamer
formatting options that I used a lot in the old exporter.

1. I *did* use the block environment to emphasize some text by pulling
it out of the "itemize" bullet lists. If I customize blockenv in org
to render as "itemize," then I lose the ability to do this (or, I have
to call "block" something else).

2. BMCOL (column) layouts are completely ignored.

3. Strong *emphasis* now renders in red, instead of keeping the text's
original color and switching to boldface.

I've also uploaded 3 PDFs to UbuntuOne, the point being to illustrate
how much functionality is lost in the new exporter:

1. Old exporter result
http://ubuntuone.com/2ByUYyYg5wfz07aUuUVPTP

2. New exporter result, without customizing
http://ubuntuone.com/4HSQUoDlZpNHZ46OROZd54

3. New exporter result, with Nick's customization
http://ubuntuone.com/1DnRQultVtdf2OKYjaeSsu


I get the feeling here that the new beamer exporter was written
without a lot of real-world user requirements. Certainly, it's
understandable that HTML, LaTeX article-style and ODT exporters would
be more widely used and more important to get right first. For beamer,
though, I can't reconcile the announcement ("Even though the internals
are completely different, the new exporter mostly behaves like its
predecessor. There are only a few noticeable changes") with the fact
that the new beamer exporter is a rather different animal that
completely breaks compatibility with org files written for the old
exporter, and may actually require a complete redo of the org markup
for each file.

I know my emacs-lisp chops are not up to the task of fixing what is
broken in the new beamer exporter. I can supply a couple dozen source
files, to help decide what level of backward compatibility is
feasible. I'm not sure how else I can help.

At least, it would be good to clarify, with respect to the
announcement, if the new beamer exporter is intended to be reasonably
backward-compatible with the old (with not-too-intrusive tweaks). If
that was the intent, then it's not ready for release. Otherwise, I'd
be happy to help draw up an upgrade path for people like myself who
have developed workflows for the old exporter that will eventually not
be supported anymore.

In the meantime, I must stick with the old exporter, though I'll keep
the discussion alive to hash out on the mailing list what needs to be
done to make the new one production-ready for me.

hjh

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