Irreal

The tireless Artur Malabarba has shown us how to make custom Org links for special purposes before (1, 2). Now he shows us how to implement Markdown links. The point here is that with Markdown, you define a link and associated ID once and can refer to it any number of times thereafter by mentioning its ID.

That’s nice if you refer to the link several times in your document. Instead of looking up the URL each time, you can give it an ID and then use that ID each time you want to refer to it. This could be especially useful if you later need to change the URL for some reason.

Malabarba’s implementation takes 3 simple functions, two of which are required by the Org Link mechanism. It’s pretty easy and could be really useful for certain types of workflows. Take a look at his post for the details.

Last time, I wrote about how Bin Chen writes in Org mode and exports the final document to Word doc format. Most engineers are spared the indignity of having to produce Word documents but if you’re a writer producing anything other than technical books, you will almost certainly have to deliver your work as a Word file. That makes a lot of sense for publishers, as I’ve written about previously, but it’s a real pain for technically literate writers.

Tony Ballantyne is a Science Fiction writer and an Emacs user. Ballantyne has an excellent post on his Emacs Writing Setup. The post covers how he uses the various Emacs tools—including Org mode—to organize his books, take notes, record ideas, and maintain a style sheet.

Like Bin Chen, he exports the results to odt format when he’s done. His process seems a little simpler than Chen’s. He just exports it to odt, loads it into whatever Word clone he’s using, and saves it as a doc file. That’s an extra manual step but not an onerous one.

If you use Emacs for writing and need to deliver the result as a Word document, you should definitely read Ballantyne’s post. Even if you’re not a professional writer banging out fiction, Ballantyne has some good tips of making the most of Emacs for the task. If you like his writing tips, checkout his Emacs Workout page that links to many of his writing-with-Emacs posts.