Irreal

Erik L. Arneson has a useful post that describes his method of converting an Org document to DOCX. His reason for doing that is the usual: his clients want a Word document but like all right thinking people, Arneson prefers to write in Org. His workflow lets him have both: a sane document preparation environment and an output that meets his clients’ needs.

Those of you familiar with exporting Org documents know that there are two ways of doing this. One is export directly to DOCX and the other is to use Pandoc. Most observers feel that Pandoc does a better job with DOCX so that’s what Arneson uses.

The post describes how to set up a template for the conversion so that you get a nice looking Word document. His workflow is complicated by the need to deal with several templates depending on the client and project. Because of that, he runs Pandoc from the command line but, as he admits, it’s possible to use ox-pandoc to automate all that by providing a bit of header matter in the Org document.

Having to provide a Word document is terrible, of course, but it’s depressingly common so Arneson’s how to is welcome. His post notes two negatives. First, he usually has to tweak the final Word document in LibreOffice to get it to look just right. Secondly, and much more depressing, is that many clients are now asking for a Google Docs document. That’s depressing because there’s no good Org to Google Docs pipeline but more importantly because no sane person or organization should be using Google Docs. Irreal has discussed this last point so many times that most of you are probably tired of reading about it. Still …

Regardless, if you have to produce Word documents but prefer a sane editing environment, take a look at Arneson’s post.

Andrey Listopadov has (yet another) post on blogging with Hugo. His post is distinguished by his attempt to be comprehensive. He says that when he was trying to start blogging all the “how to” posts were too shallow to be helpful and that he wanted his to be truly useful. His other desire was to show how to use Emacs and Org-mode in the workflow.

If you want a static blog—and there are plenty of reasons to prefer that—then this is a very useful post to read. Even if you don’t want to write in Emacs and Org there is a lot of useful information on how to get started. Most of the information is a step-by-step guide to setting up a Hugo blog so I won’t repeat it here; take a look at the post for the details.

One of the things I liked most about his post was a sort of afterthought. Listopadov asks if you, the reader, should start blogging. He concludes that, yes, you should. His reason for thinking so is neatly captured by Daniel Boorstin’s (the 12^th Librarian of Congress) famous quote, “I write to find out what I think.” Actually, the full quote is even better: “I write to find out what I think. After all, the bars aren’t open that early.” Humor aside, it’s a great point. I often find that I don’t understand something until I write about it. If you’re an engineer, you may find that you’ll understand a problem better after writing about it. What better place to do that than a blog?

Marcin Borkowski often watches long YouTube videos (frequently lectures) and sometimes can’t watch the whole thing in a single sitting. A couple of weeks ago, he wrote a post about capturing the elapsed play time where he left off and adding it to a link to the video that he maintained within Org-mode. That way when he followed the link, the video would start where he left off.

He’s discovered what he describes as a “much much better solution” to the problem. And it really is. He leverages a youtube-dl fork and mpv to play YouTube videos directly from Emacs. That’s already pretty nice but mpv can also remember where you left off so that you don’t need anything fancy to help you remember. There are a couple of ways of doing that so be sure to check out Borkowski’s post for the details.

Oddly, the code to do all this is simpler and shorter than the code to capture the time and add it to a link. If you want to store links to YouTube videos for later watching and be able to remember how much you’ve watched, this is a great solution.

Karl Voit has reposted an article from 2018 on using Org-mode to organize your life. Voit, as many of you know, is very interested in personal information managers (PIMs) and curating information for later retrieval. He says that when he discovered Org-mode, he knew he had found a tool to last him a lifetime. Partly that’s because the functionality is so rich and extensible but mainly because everything is in text.

Having everything in text future proofs Org mode because the files will always be readable by any application that can deal with ASCII or UTF-8. To be sure, you won’t have all the display and processing capabilities outside of Emacs but the files are still readable and easy to translate into any format.

Voit compares Org-mode to a box of Lego blocks. Everyone can take whatever blocks they want from the box and build a customized work environment tailored exactly to their workflow. Voit says he spends about 90% of his computer time inside Org-mode. That seems a lot but Org enables so many different workflows from literate programming, to document preparation, to record keeping, to blogging, to handling agendas and itineraries that it’s easy to use it for just about everything.

Org-mode is probably the most important part of my workflow and I wouldn’t want to do without it. If you aren’t already using Org, take a look at Voit’s post to get an idea of why you might want to.