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Headlines require both space and star


From: Ryan Tate
Subject: Headlines require both space and star
Date: Wed, 06 May 2020 18:17:26 -0400

Hello, I am writing to suggest that the documents reflect that both a star and space are required to create a headline, not just a star.

Today I learned org mode through the manual, compact guide, "Org mode beginning at the basics" at orgmode.org and David O'Toole tutorial at orgmode.org.

I spent about 15 minutes trying to figure out why folding wasn't "working" in the very first org doc I then created.

It turns out I was not including a space after the star in my headlines. My doc looked like this:

*Intro
**First Part
**Second Part
***Sub part
**Third Part

etc.

When I did add spaces after the stars, suddenly the headlines were recognized (color changes) and folding worked as described in the manual at last. (I am on GNU Emacs 26.3 (build 1, x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 3.24.11) of 2019-12-10)

I went to see if I missed something when I read the docs. Here are various ways headlines are described, none seem to mention the space after the star being required:

Manual, compact guide: " The headlines in Org start with one or more stars, on the left margin3. For example..." https://orgmode.org/manual/Headlines.html#Headlines
https://orgmode.org/guide/Headlines.html#Headlines

Org mode beginning at the basics: "This is a headline, it starts with one or more stars. A heading has one star, a sub-heading two, etc."
https://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/org4beginners.html

David O'Toole Org Tutorial: "First-level headlines begin with one star; second-level headlines begin with two stars, and so on. "
https://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/orgtutorial_dto.html

I am presuming that the requirement of a space after a star has been omitted from the docs and is not an implementation error. If the latter I could probably put together a bug report for the code itself. If the former, I would simply suggest that the docs be amended to fully describe the actual requirements of headlines so others who do read the friendly manual as I did do not waste their own 15 minutes :-) If people are open to this, and a more proper patch is required, I would be happy to submit one in a more elaborate and correct format.

If this has been brought up before, or I am misunderstanding, I apologize in advance; the gmane gateway seems to be down so I cannot search the archives at the moment.

Cheers and thanks for org mode.

      Ryan



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