Irreal

Mike Hamrick has put up an excellent video on using Emacs and Org-mode to publish nice looking and consistent technical documents. In preparing a document, Hamrick uses literate programming and—although he doesn’t mention it—reproducible research techniques. That’s important, because as he notes, if the code or data used in the document changes, things that depend on that code or data will change as well and it’s important to keep them in sync.

This is exactly the problem—or at least one of the problems—that Org-mode’s Babel was designed to solve. By having Babel embed the results of running the document’s code against its data into the document itself, you’re guaranteed that everything will stay consistent.

Hamrick has a few tricks that he uses to get a nice looking document and keep it consistent. For HTML, he uses Fabrice Niessen’s ReadTheOrg theme, which I’ve written about before, to produce beautiful HTML documents. The other trick he uses that I really liked is to have a file of helper functions that he can call from the text he’s writing. These do things like return the length of a string or the first 2 characters of a string. By using them, he ensures that his document remains consistent even if the data the string is from changes.

Don’t worry about trying to absorb the source code from the video. He’s put all the code and data for the video on GitLab. Similarly, his configuration files are on GitLab so you can see his publishing setup.

The video is 22 minutes, 42 seconds long so you’ll need to block out some time but it’s very much worth it. If you use Org-mode in your writing, you really need to watch this video.

Mike Zamansky has another video up in his Using Emacs Series. This time he looks at writing mu4e emails in Org-mode. Like me, he mostly wants to send plain text emails but sometimes he’d like to send tables, source code, or other rich text. He tried using the built-in org-mu4e-compose-org-mode but it’s deprecated and didn’t do everything he wanted. I’ve had the same experience. I tried org-mu4e-compose-org-mode but it didn’t do many of the things I cared about so I stopped using it.

Happily, Zamansky has found another solution: org-msg. It does a much better job of allowing you to use Org markup in your emails and rendering the results nicely. Of course, to do that it sends your mail as HTML so if you don’t like that, org-msg is not for you.

Take a look at Zamansky’s video to see both org-mu4e-compose-org-mode and org-msg in action. You can see right away why org-msg is the superior solution. In addition to its better rendering, org-msg is more configurable. You can, for example, set it to automatically add a signature or to extract the sender’s name from an email you’re replying to and use it to add a salutation.

If you’ve been looking for a way to use Org-mode with mu4e, be sure to spend a few minutes to watch this video. The video is just short of 15 minutes so it should be easy to find some time for it.

Perhaps because I’ve always worked for smaller organizations, I’ve never had to deal with Gantt charts. I’ve always considered them yet another management fad but that may be due to ignorant prejudice. In any event, lots of people use them and find them useful.

The other day I saw a pointer to a recent video on generating Gantt charts with Org-mode. It turns out to be pretty easy. Once you get the start and end dates into an Org table it’s just a matter of invoking a bit of gnuplot code from a source block to generate the chart.

As I said, I don’t have much interest in Gantt charts but I do like reading about leveraging Org-mode to accomplish tasks that used to take dedicated applications. The video is 13 minutes, 11 seconds so it should be easy to fit it in. It’s worth taking a look at if only to see how versatile Org-mode and Emacs can be.

Recently, James Gill tweeted about a collection of Emacs resources for writers that he’s curated into a GitHub repository. There are two parts to the collection:

1. Tips and examples for writing with Emacs, and
2. Writing a book with Emacs.

As you’d expect, most of the articles are about leveraging Org-mode for writing. That’s no surprise, of course, because Org excels at that. Indeed, almost any type of writing from memos or blog posts—such as Irreal’s—to journal articles or books is easily accomplished with Org. I’ve reached the point were virtually everything I write is done with Org-mode.

Sadly, the literary writing market runs on Word so if that’s your niche, you’re going to have to deal with conversion. Org, of course, has built in tools for that and if those don’t meet your needs, the excellent Pandoc almost certainly will.

If you’re a writer who’d like to escape from the pain that is Word and give Emacs a try, be sure to read the articles in Gill’s list. I’ve discussed several of them in Irreal previously but a few are new to me. A handful of the resources are videos but most are short blog posts or articles that are easy and quick to read.

It’s not always obvious how to use Emacs for writing effectively so the articles and videos collected by Gill, which distill a lot of hard won wisdom, can be a real help.

Karl Voit has an interesting post in which he explores ways of defining projects in Org-mode. Note that by “project” Voit doesn’t mean the type of object handled by an app such as Projectile, but a set of tasks meant to achieve a common goal. If you’re like me, the answer seems obvious: add a project tag to the header defining the project.

Of course, things aren’t that simple, especially for someone like Voit who on the one hand has exacting standards for how things should appear in, say, his agenda but on the other hand wants very fluid Org files. By “fluid” I mean that projects aren’t necessarily top level items or even second level items. They can appear anywhere in the tree. I’m inclined to be more rigid in my Org file layout so I avoid some of the problems that Voit has.

Voit discusses several possibilities along with their pros and cons. I’ll let you read his post to see what solution he finally settled on. If you’re trying to impose a project structure on top of Org, it’s definitely worth taking a look at his discussion.