Most of you know how I love reading “workflow” articles, especially if they involve Emacs and Org. Brandon van Beekum has a nice post on how he uses Org mode to take notes and then export them to share with others. For his example, he demonstrates how he might take notes on a computer science paper but even if you’re interested in creative writing and have no interest in scientific matters, you will still find his write-up instructive.
Van Beekum starts with a title and the outline headings Summary and Links. He adds some text to the Summary section that describes what he’s trying to accomplish by reading this paper and adds various links to supporting documents in the Links section.
As he goes along, he adds a Notes section that he uses to capture interesting points from the paper including, in his case, a bit of code that he puts in a code block for proper formatting. He even demonstrates generating a graph with Babel and Dot.
For export, van Beekum uses his ox-twbs package which is much like ox-html but with some extra formatting and an interactive table of contents off to the side. It produces very nice output and is worth considering if you produce a lot of HTML documents to share with colleagues and friends.
If you’re interested in using Org mode to take notes—whether or not you want to export them later—van Beekum’s post is worth a read. It uses very simple Org functionality so it’s a good way of starting with Org mode.