I’ve been a long time fan of Eric Fraga’s quiet work in the Emacs sphere. He an academic who, as far as I know, doesn’t work directly on Emacs development but is nevertheless active in the community making suggestions and answering questions. If you check the Emacs Devel list or the Org Mode Devel list, you’ll see his name all over the place. He’s even stopped by Irreal a couple of times.
I was, therefore, delighted to see that he had make a contribution to Greg Newman’s Emacs Carnival Writing Experience. His experiences are worth listening to because he has been using Emacs and Org mode to write his technical papers for a long time. He works in process systems engineering so he can get away without having to make his submissions in the format whose name must not be mentioned.
His Emacs Carnival contribution discusses some of the advantages of using Emacs/Org mode for writing his papers. Those include the usual ability of combining code and prose in the same file, having the code be executable, and having it modify the prose in the file. He leverages that ability to generate diagrams and graphs directly from data in the paper. That’s a real win because the diagrams and graphs always reflect the data in the paper and don’t get out of sync.
Another example of the power of Emacs that he gives is almost trivial but vastly underrated: abbreviations. If there are words that you use all the time—especially long words or words that are difficult to spell—this can be a real time saver. See Fraga’s post for an example.
I’m really enjoying the Emacs Carnival Writing Experience and was glad to see Fraga share his views.