Irreal

If you enjoyed yesterday’s post about Daniel Gomez using Org-mode to write his thesis, perhaps you’ll also like his other offering, An Emacs Library for frictionless Blogging.

Gomez publishes his blog on write.as, a publishing platform that allows you to make a blog post, say, by sending the Markdown content in an HTML POST request. If you read yesterday’s post, you know that Gomez is an avid Emacs and Org-mode user so naturally he wanted to write his posts with Org-mode and publish them directly from Emacs. To do that he wrote a small library that takes an Org file, extracts the title, converts the Org formatting to Markdown, sends the Markdown to write.as, and retrieves the publishing information from write.as in return.

It’s an excellent solution if you don’t mind having your blog be part of a “federated” platform such as write.as. It’s perfect for someone like Gomez, who as a PhD student and occasional blogger, doesn’t have the time or inclination to deal with a dedicated server (or virtual server) and a more complicated blogging platform such as WordPress. Once he wrote his library, publishing a post consists of writing it and calling a single function to publish it.

Take a look at Gomez’s post for the details. His code is available on GitHub.

I keep seeing statements from the uninformed to the effect that you can’t use Org-mode for “serious” writing. First it was, “you can’t use Org-mode for journal articles.” After John Kitchin put the lie to that story, the naysayers moved on to, “Org-mode could never be used for GNU manuals, except we have this.

The latest skirmish is about whether you can use Org-mode to write your thesis. Despite the many examples of people doing just that, we still have plenty of people saying it can’t/shouldn’t be done.

Daniel Gomez was having none of that and wrote a very nice post showing how to set up an Org-mode thesis writing environment. His thesis has all the pain points that the naysayers claim makes writing a thesis with Org-mode too hard or impossible. It’s a scientific thesis so it’s got equations, figures, and code; large parts of the thesis were published in journals with other formatting requirements; and finally, his thesis supervisor prefers to use Microsoft Word.

Gomez shows how to overcome all these obstacles and write both the journal articles and thesis in Org-mode. The journal articles can imported directly into the thesis because he’s tagged the unwanted content and formatting to be ignored when it’s used in the thesis.

If you’re about to write your thesis and would like to do so in the comfortable Org-mode environment, take a look at Gomez’s post.

Regular readers know that I’m fascinated with how non-coders use Emacs and especially how (prose) writers leverage it to remove friction from the writing process. Phil Daniels over at The Copytist is a professional writer who’s working on a longish book of about 400 pages.

His writing environment was centered on Microsoft Windows running Google Docs. It had, apparently, been working well for shorter projects but Google Docs just couldn’t handle the larger manuscript. Daniels mentions, in particular, the difficulty of moving chapters around.

With the deadline looming, he decided to try something new and after watching Jay Dixit’s video on using Emacs for writing he installed Emacs, pasted his manuscript into an Org file and got to work. He discovered, as many have, that Emacs and Windows have a troubled relationship so he installed Debian, added the necessary packages, and had what he considers the perfect writing environment.

Two things struck me about his post. First, although I have written at length about the dangers of committing any writing that you care about to Google Docs, I’ve never used it so I was surprised that despite it popularity it doesn’t perform very well. I’ll be adding that to my list of reasons to avoid it.

Second, although Daniels is delighted with how efficient Emacs makes his writing, he hardly uses any of its features. Doubtless that will change as he becomes more experienced with Emacs and discovers new chores that Emacs can help him with but it’s amazing at how much he can get done using just a few basic Emacs navigation commands and a couple of the Org-mode structure editing functions.

If you’re interested in a writing environment, take a look at Daniels post. It’s short and it describes an environment that few would consider complete but it points the way.