Irreal

John Herrlin has another nice post. This time it’s on using Org-mode tables. Like his post on Org source blocks, he concentrates on examples of how he, himself, uses Org tables. Both of his posts take, I think, an intermediate point of view. For example, the Table post is more than the usual beginner explanation of how to input and edit tables; it covers how to make calculations in those tables. It’s a nice follow on to his previous post that considered how to do essentially the same thing using source blocks and some external language.

The exposition isn’t advanced but he does take up the subject of clock tables, which can be a bit confusing for beginners. What I like about this post is that it shows how useful Org mode can be even if your aren’t a programmer. There’s nothing in Herrlin’s examples that couldn’t apply to any worker familiar with using a computer or even to someone like, say, a writer or journalist who wants to keep track of their time or work with data in a systematic way using tables.

If you’re an experience Org table user, you probably won’t find anything new in the post but beginner or intermediate users are very likely to find something useful in it.

One of the great things about Emacs is Org-mode. One of the great things about Org-mode is source blocks. They enable literate programming, of course, but are also a great way of taking notes with code examples and a really great way for writing dynamic documents that stay consistent when some item changes.

John Herrlin has a post that serves as a nice introduction to using source blocks. I hadn’t seen awk used in a code block before and was pleased to learn about the :stdin and :in-file parameters as way to direct input to awk. And although it’s obvious in retrospect, he also shows how you can put data in an EXAMPLE block and use it as input to a code block.

Even if you know a bit about Org source blocks, it’s definitely worthwhile taking a look at Herrlin’s post. If you’re trying to come to speed with source blocks, I’d read Herrlin’s post, followed by Abrams’ Literate Devops post, and then watch Mike Hamrick’s video on consistent technical documents. They cover different aspects of source blocks and together serve as a splendid overview on ways to use them.

Over at the Emacs Notes blog there’s an interesting tutorial on how to style ODT output when exporting from Org-mode. The tutorial uses the “problem” of producing a manuscript for a novel. That’s a good example because literary publishers like to pretend that we’re still using typewriters and the manuscripts, in addition to having a highly stylized format, are most often rendered in Courier.

The tutorial shows an example of the output you’d get from Org normally and then the desired format you get after adding some XML definitions to your Org file. It’s very much like adding HTML definitions for exporting to the Web. The process is a bit complicated but the tutorial steps you through what has to be done.

Most of us aren’t writing novels, of course, but many of us do have to produce ODT files either as an end product or to accommodate our colleagues. That’s not a problem until the document needs special formatting. This tutorial tells you how to make a style sheet to do this. If you’re producing the same type of document many times, you need only to do this once.

If you’re interested in learning how to control the formatting of Org-mode ODT output, this tutorial is definitely worth taking a look at. The author did a lot of research and hunted up information that’s hard to find. Reading it will save you a lot of time.