Re: [O] templating with Org?

[Eric Abrahamsen]

John Kitchin <address@hidden> writes:

> I don't have the impression you would need to hijack the export
> process. It seems like you would need to call a function that gets
> data from some source (e.g the org document) and then populates a
> template with that data, and once that is done, call a regular export
> function. There are a number of template solutions:
> http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CategoryTemplates. I am not sure these
> are too easy to adapt to what you describe.

That's an interesting idea: going from the base Org file to a massaged
Org buffer, and then exporting that. I'll try that out for a bit. Thanks
for that, and for the links!

> I played around with some ideas for this here:
>
> http://kitchingroup.cheme.cmu.edu/blog/2014/01/20/Alternatives-to-long-complex-format-statements-in-emacs-lisp/
>
> http://kitchingroup.cheme.cmu.edu/blog/2014/01/26/Another-alternative-to-string-templates/
>
>
> Something like these could be used to populate a template I think.
>
> John
>
> -----------------------------------
> Professor John Kitchin 
> Doherty Hall A207F
> Department of Chemical Engineering
> Carnegie Mellon University
> Pittsburgh, PA 15213
> 412-268-7803
> @johnkitchin
> http://kitchingroup.cheme.cmu.edu
>
> On Sat, Aug 8, 2015 at 12:48 AM, Eric Abrahamsen
> <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>
>     Exporting org files and subtrees is awfully flexible, given all
>     the
>     possible customizations, but for a long while I've occasionally
>     felt the
>     need to come at the "export" process from the other direction:
>     instead
>     of customizing the export appearance of a series of headings,
>     instead
>     starting with a common block of export text, and interpolating
>     values
>     from the headings into that text -- ie, templating.
>
>     I've felt this need off and on for a couple of years, most
>     recently when
>     organizing a small literary festival. I really need to keep all
>     the
>     information about the events in a single place, otherwise I know
>     that
>     information will go stale right away. But I need the information
>     in a
>     series of such wildly-varying formats that I can't imagine setting
>     up
>     (and switching between) export filters in a way that wouldn't make
>     me
>     cry. Not to mention that the different "export" use-cases all have
>     their
>     own per-heading boilerplate text, and there's no way I'm going to
>     repeat
>     all that different boilerplate under each heading.
>
>     Obviously there's many ways this could be done. I could somehow
>     hijack
>     the export process -- in many cases it would be nice too make use
>     of the
>     skeleton document structures that export provides.
>
>     Or maybe dynamic blocks? I've never used them before. Or maybe
>     just a
>     plain old `org-map-entries', which reads the template text from an
>     external file and then steals some of the macro expansion
>     functions to
>     fill out the values.
>
>     Has anyone wanted to do this before? Has anyone actually done it?
>     Any
>     thoughts or suggestions would be much appreciated!
>
>     Yours,
>     Eric