Irreal

As you all know, I’m always talking up Org Mode and encouraging people to try it out. Org is so flexible that I spend a large percentage of my Emacs time in it. Where others might use a spreadsheet, I just use an Org table with automatic column or row calculations. Where others use Word or some like spawn of the devil, I use Org Mode and export it to whatever form I need. Where others torture themselves by writing blog posts in WordPress’s built-in editor, I use Org Mode with all the power of Emacs and then automatically post it to the Irreal site with org2blog/wp.

All that capability comes with a downside, though. It’s hard to get started and learn what you can do. Like Emacs itself, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by sheer magnitude of what’s included in the box. Until now, the most useful sources of information were the Org Manual (of course), and Bernt Hansen’s Org Mode – Organize Your Life In Plain Text. Hansen’s article is particularly useful because it’s a (constantly updated) Org file that documents how he uses Org Mode along with examples that demonstrate the various aspects of Org. The examples serve as an excellent go-by for the new user. When I was first starting with Org, I’d find an example of what I was trying to do in his document and mimic what he did. If you’re an Org Mode user (new or not) you really should take a look at it.

Now Eric Neilsen has produced a document similar but complementary to Hansen’s. His Emacs org-mode examples and cookbook is like Hansen’s Organize Your Life In Plain Text in that it serves as a cookbook with recipes for performing various tasks in Org Mode. Although there is a bit of overlap, Neilsen concentrates on producing LaTeX documents and with interacting with Python and R. While Hansen’s document is (mostly) concerned with things a consultant might want to do, Neilsen’s is more oriented to the needs of a researcher. His guide will be especially useful to someone wanting to produce publishable papers—especially for papers produced using the reproducible research model.

Neilsen’s cookbook is an excellent addition to the must-have Org documentation. I’ve added it to my Docs bookmark in my browser. Take a few minutes to look it over and I’m sure you’ll want to do the same thing.

Arne Babenhauserheide has posted another great how-to on using Org Mode. This time it’s on using Org to write technical papers for publication. As with his previous post that I wrote about, this one can be exported to HTML or PDF but renders nicely in either format.

Some of the post is specific to the ACPD Journal but is easily extended to any other journal given their LaTeX style sheet. The nice thing about the tutorial is that it takes a reproducible research approach to writing scientific papers. As faithful Irreal readers know, I’m a big fan reproducible research and hope to see it become the standard for all journal papers.

If your situation requires the publication of papers and you’re an Emacs user, you should take a look at this post. These days, I do almost all my writing through Org Mode and I’m always happy to see ways to see it used for other writing tasks.

Oscar Perpiñán Lamigueiro is writing a book. Lots of people do that, of course, but Lamigueiro is doing it with Org Mode. Just the other day, I wrote that Emacs is multifaceted and Lamigueiro demonstrates another of those facets and a pretty high powered one at that.

If you’ve wondered how one might go about producing camera ready copy for a technical book, give Lamigueiro’s post a read. You should also take a look at the Memoir Class documentation that he mentions in the post. I don’t know about you but I love reading things like this. It’s always great to see how people are using Emacs, especially if it’s in ways I haven’t thought of.