I discovered that the lines ( the body of a headline): *** real headline * example :SCHEDULED: <times>
cause agenda processing to fail. It tries to parse <times> as a timestamp. The parser used by agenda appears not to enforce the requirement that headlines begin with asterisks on the left margin. Removing either the leading colon or the asterisk on example fixes the problem. Regular display parsing does not get confused. The highlighting and font changes do not consider the " * example" to be a headline. -- Robert Horn rjh...@alum.mit.edu