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18.1 Org Syntax

Paragraph—Unit of Measurement

The paragraph is the unit of measurement. Every other syntactical part exists within specific environments, or categories.

Within the syntax, there exist elements and objects. Elements are related to the structure of the document. An element always starts and ends at the beginning of a line. Objects are related to the content of the document, and some can be recursive.

Syntactical Environments

Three categories are used to classify the syntactical environments:

Greater elements

Greater elements are all parts that can contain an element. Greater elements can contain directly any other element or greater element except:

• elements of their own type,
• node properties, which can only be found in property drawers,
• items, which can only be found in plain lists.

Elements

An element defines syntactical parts that are at the same level as a paragraph, i.e. which cannot contain or be included in a paragraph.

Objects

An object is a part that could be included in an element.

• Elements—Greater Elements—Objects
• Properties
• Context-Free Elements
• Types—Environments
• Attributes
• Affiliated Keywords