Irreal

Dominik Honnef has a nifty post that describes his Org-roam based workflow for taking notes and writing articles. It’s a very thorough and complex system that captures notes, articles that he reads on the web, articles for his blog, and miscellaneous notes as they occur to him. The system automatically maintains a bibliography and can massage a note intended for his blog to make it compatible with Hugo, which he uses to publish his blog.

His use of Org-roam is a little idiosyncratic. He doesn’t follow Luhmann’s Zettelkasten method as described, for example, by Ahrens’ How to take smart notes: one simple technique to boost writing, learning and thinking. Rather, he uses it as a sort of Wiki to save and index all his notes and the data they pertain to. Org-roam is perfect for that because it maintains forward and backward links between notes and makes it easy to maintain the relationship between notes and index them for easy retrieval.

His system is tightly integrated with Zotero to manage the papers he reads and takes notes on. He lets Zotero handle the bibliography and capturing of papers and websites. Although he provides much of his configuration in his long and detailed post, he doesn’t provide a link to his whole configuration so it may be hard to adapt his approach.

It’s a good post and well worth spending the time to read.

I have a longstanding fascination with document layout. It’s something I first learned from Rich Stevens. His books were always visually beautiful with a layout that showed an obsessive attention to detail. Fortunately, he wrote about his process extensively on his Website and was generous with his help when I was laying out my first book.

Like Stevens, I wrote and typeset my books with Groff. These days, I do all my writing with Org mode so I’m always interested in ways the make Org mode exports look better. I recently I came across two posts that address this very problem.

The first is by Norman Walsh. His interest is customizing PDF output from Org files. He didn’t like the way the default output made his documents look like academic papers. He includes output from both the default method and his customized method so that you can see the differences.

The second is by Colin McLear, a teacher who wants to use the same Org file to produce

1. A set of notes for his students
2. A set of slides for his lectures
3. A handout version of the slides with additional content

Walsh’s post contains all his configuration except his setup files. Those are available in his GitHub repository.

Neither of these setups are likely to be exactly what you want but they’re ripe with ideas and show you how to make your own customizations. The ability to do this means that there’s no reason to do your writing in anything but Org. If you have special output requirements, it’s pretty easy to realize them with some simple configuration.

UPDATE [2023-01-14 Sat 18:55]: Added link to McLear’s post.

Sacha Chua has a problem. From an Org file, she’d like to link to and possibly include a set of consecutive lines in another (or, I suppose, the same) file. The problem is that the target file may not be static so using line numbers, which are subject to change, doesn’t work.

Her solution is to define a custom link that includes two regular expressions. That way, she can link to and include the lines between the two regexps. Check out her post for an example and a few more details.

Most of Sacha’s post is the code that defines the new link type and that, of course, is worth studying just to see how one goes about doing that even if you aren’t interested in the problem Sacha’s solving. Like all of Sacha’s posts, it’s definitely worth taking a look at.