Irreal

Ankit Gadiya has a very nice post that explains and demonstrates how he uses Org for presentations. It’s a nice workflow that uses Org, Logos, Olivetti, and Pikchr to create and display his presentation.

Gadiya starts his presentations with an outline. That’s a natural thing to do in Org mode, of course, and he has things configured so that each header and subheader is the title of a slide. That makes it easy to move things around an restructure the presentation.

He uses Pikchr, a Pic-like language for line diagrams. I didn’t know about it and have never used it but I have used Pic a lot and really like it. I’ll definitely be checking out Pikchr since I don’t use the Troff suite much any longer.

A nice thing about Gadiya’s post is that he shows his complete configuration so it’s easy to replicate or adapt it. I like this approach much better than the fancier packages like Apple’s Keynote that I always find difficult to use because they offer so many features.

If you regularly—or even occasionally—find yourself giving presentations, take a look at Gadiya’s post. If you’re an Org user, you’ll find the workflow familiar and easy. He has a lot of good ideas and they’re all documented well in his post.

Donald Hunter over at donaldh.wtf has an interesting post about Org Babel’s many powers and uses. Hunter thinks of it as a “polyglot Jupyter Notebook ” and uses it extensively for both professional and personal projects. His post consists of several examples of how he uses it.

One trick he shows is using the dir command to specify a remote machine. That allows him to capture output from the remote host.

Another trick he uses is isolating the boilerplate for several similar source blocks into a separate block and including it in the blocks that need it with the noweb syntax. See his post for a fully worked example.

Finally he demonstrates the real power of Babel by using two different languages. The way that works is that you use a convenient language in one block to produce an intermediate result and finish the computation in a second block with another language that calls the first block to get the intermediate result.

In his example, he uses an SQL block to read data from an SQL database and processes that data in the second block using Gnuplot. Of course, you can chain more than two blocks together or have more than one block feeding the final block.

Org Babel really is a powerful system and is part of what sets Org apart from Markdown and other markup languages. You might also want to take a look at Mike Hamrick’s video on using Org and Babel for writing.

Brian Hogan has a post that I, at least, find provocative. His thesis is that Markdown—and by extension, Org-mode—are holding you back because they’re not semantic. That’s true, in a way, I guess, but both Markdown and Org-mode are Markup languages. That means they’re concerned with producing publishable content: they consider what things look like on the printed page or the screen.

They are, in their way, semantic languages in that they specify what grammatical object is being described. Markdown, and especially Org, can use that information to display the item in a manner appropriate for the output target. Of course, Hogan wants a stronger sense of semantic where the markup describes higher order meanings such as “step in a process” instead of simply “a bullet item”.

The problem is that that always ends in tears. It ends, in short, in abominations like XML. XML is, in fact, what Hogan really wants but even he knows it’s a horrible solution beloved by exactly no one. Still, he says, it’s necessary because otherwise it’s too hard for AI agents and the like to discern the meaning of the markup.

Forgive me for saying that that’s not my problem. My problem is producing a nice looking document that human beings can read, understand, and enjoy. If AI companies want to get rich by training their AI agents on my content, it’s certainly not incumbent on me to make their job easier.

And by the way, why doesn’t Hogan mention Org-mode. It does, after all, meet a lot of his requirements, have a single definition, and allows the easy—for some definitions of easy—specification of backends that can be semantically aware.

So, as Betteridge’s Law of Headlines insists, no, Markdown is not holding us back. I understand Hogan’s views to the contrary and I certainly don’t accuse him of bad faith but I fail to see how Markdown or Org-mode is holding us back in any meaningful way.