Irreal

Alex Kladov has a post that discusses various markup languages and what makes a great one. He considers

• Markdown
• AsciiDoctor
• LaTeX
• reStructuredText
• HTML

He finds them all lacking in various ways. He believes that any markup that’s tied to a particular target language—he puts Markdown is this category, unfairly I think—is already losing. He believes that the parsing (and syntax) of the input language should be decoupled from the target language and the driver that produces it.

If you look at the above list, you’ll notice a glaring omission: Org mode is missing. That’s too bad because Org meets most of the criteria that Kladov calls out. It’s got a simple, lightweight syntax; it’s tree structured; and has a simple format for links, lists, and tables. Perhaps most importantly for Kladov, Org mode markup syntax is not tied to any particular target language. Indeed, there are several targets and new ones are being added all the time. Even with a given target language, Org mode is flexible and extensible. You can mark some text as belonging to a particular environment with the name of your choice and define the semantic meaning of the environment with CSS or a LaTeX environment who definition you can include in a couple of ways. See this post for details.

Of course, ports notwithstanding, Org is mostly tied to Emacs. Much of the simplicity of writing in Org is because of shortcuts built into Emacs. Regardless, if you want the best and most flexible markup language, you should be using Org. Karl Voit makes a strong case that Org is the superior markup language and I certainly agree. It would have been interesting to see Kladov’s take.

Erik L. Arneson has a useful post that describes his method of converting an Org document to DOCX. His reason for doing that is the usual: his clients want a Word document but like all right thinking people, Arneson prefers to write in Org. His workflow lets him have both: a sane document preparation environment and an output that meets his clients’ needs.

Those of you familiar with exporting Org documents know that there are two ways of doing this. One is export directly to DOCX and the other is to use Pandoc. Most observers feel that Pandoc does a better job with DOCX so that’s what Arneson uses.

The post describes how to set up a template for the conversion so that you get a nice looking Word document. His workflow is complicated by the need to deal with several templates depending on the client and project. Because of that, he runs Pandoc from the command line but, as he admits, it’s possible to use ox-pandoc to automate all that by providing a bit of header matter in the Org document.

Having to provide a Word document is terrible, of course, but it’s depressingly common so Arneson’s how to is welcome. His post notes two negatives. First, he usually has to tweak the final Word document in LibreOffice to get it to look just right. Secondly, and much more depressing, is that many clients are now asking for a Google Docs document. That’s depressing because there’s no good Org to Google Docs pipeline but more importantly because no sane person or organization should be using Google Docs. Irreal has discussed this last point so many times that most of you are probably tired of reading about it. Still …

Regardless, if you have to produce Word documents but prefer a sane editing environment, take a look at Arneson’s post.

Andrey Listopadov has (yet another) post on blogging with Hugo. His post is distinguished by his attempt to be comprehensive. He says that when he was trying to start blogging all the “how to” posts were too shallow to be helpful and that he wanted his to be truly useful. His other desire was to show how to use Emacs and Org-mode in the workflow.

If you want a static blog—and there are plenty of reasons to prefer that—then this is a very useful post to read. Even if you don’t want to write in Emacs and Org there is a lot of useful information on how to get started. Most of the information is a step-by-step guide to setting up a Hugo blog so I won’t repeat it here; take a look at the post for the details.

One of the things I liked most about his post was a sort of afterthought. Listopadov asks if you, the reader, should start blogging. He concludes that, yes, you should. His reason for thinking so is neatly captured by Daniel Boorstin’s (the 12^th Librarian of Congress) famous quote, “I write to find out what I think.” Actually, the full quote is even better: “I write to find out what I think. After all, the bars aren’t open that early.” Humor aside, it’s a great point. I often find that I don’t understand something until I write about it. If you’re an engineer, you may find that you’ll understand a problem better after writing about it. What better place to do that than a blog?

Marcin Borkowski often watches long YouTube videos (frequently lectures) and sometimes can’t watch the whole thing in a single sitting. A couple of weeks ago, he wrote a post about capturing the elapsed play time where he left off and adding it to a link to the video that he maintained within Org-mode. That way when he followed the link, the video would start where he left off.

He’s discovered what he describes as a “much much better solution” to the problem. And it really is. He leverages a youtube-dl fork and mpv to play YouTube videos directly from Emacs. That’s already pretty nice but mpv can also remember where you left off so that you don’t need anything fancy to help you remember. There are a couple of ways of doing that so be sure to check out Borkowski’s post for the details.

Oddly, the code to do all this is simpler and shorter than the code to capture the time and add it to a link. If you want to store links to YouTube videos for later watching and be able to remember how much you’ve watched, this is a great solution.