Q: how can I format/fill poorly-formatted items in an org-mode
bulleted list?
I'm trying to figure out how to make fill-paragraph
work on poorly formatted bulleted items in an org-mode
list. By "poorly formatted," I mean long-ish bullets that use multiple lines but need to be cleaned up to make them readable. The difficulty is that org-mode
does not seem to recognize subsequent lines as part of the same bullet when the first non-whitespace character is in the same column as the bullet itself.
Hence, in the example below, bullet (1) does not need filling, bullets (2) and (3) need filling and respond as expected to fill-paragraph
, but bullets (4) and (5) do not fill as expected:
* a header
1) a simple bullet
2) a bullet that responds nicely
to
fill-paragraph
(try it!)
3) another bullet that also responds nicely
to
fill-paragraph
even though the "t" in "to" and the
"e" in "even" line up with the space
in between the "4)" and the start of the bullet
4) a bullet that does
NOT respond to fill-paragraph
because the "N" in "NOT" is in the same column
as the start of the bullet
5) a similar problem:
the text is flush entirely to the left
First of all, why does this happen? Second, and more to the point, how can I convince org-mode
to treat all of the lines up to the next bullet as part of the same bullet for fill-paragraph
purposes?