Irreal

Christian Blades over at the Beard Institute has a nice post on how he uses Org-mode to write and manage design documents. One interesting feature of his workflow is that the document starts as a TODO item in his agenda and the details—including the text—get filled in as the document evolves. When he’s ready to share the document with the rest of his team, he exports the TODO subtree to PDF and uploads it to Google drive.

Since he’s exporting only a subtree, he puts the desired export options in a PROPERTIES drawer so that he can have per-document options if needed. That includes the file name for the PDF so he doesn’t have to manually rename the file before moving it to Google drive.

Another nice technique he uses is to decorate diagrams with sizing information so they aren’t overlarge. He does that with a bit of Elisp that gets called by the :post keyword in the source block that generates the diagram.

Take a look at Blades’ post for the details. It’s a nice workflow and one that would work for most kinds of documentation. It’s simple but seems very effective.

Rainer König is back with another video. A few days ago, he published a blog post on how he uses Org-mode for his daily plan. The basic idea is that every morning he brings up an Org template for what he wants to accomplish that day. It starts with the three most important tasks followed by other things on his agenda and finally by recurring tasks such as housecleaning and grocery shopping.

Unfortunately, the blog post didn’t have many details and I remember hoping that he would do a video to fill in those details. Happily, he has made such a video and it does make clear exactly how his system works.

If you’re looking for a way of creating and tracking a daily plan, take a look at König’s video for some good ideas. It’s pretty easy to implement using the standard Org facilities. König has links to the (small amount of) custom elisp he wrote to help with the process so everything you need is there. The point of view of this video is slightly different from the first 36. Rather than explaining and demonstrating a particular Org-mode functionality, this video shows how he uses some of that functionality in his workflow. Like all of König’s videos, it’s worth watching.

I saw a query that had a link to a post from a couple of years ago that I missed at the time. It’s by Anand Iyer who is—or, perhaps, was—a graduate student and therefore is constantly reading papers. When you’re faced with reading and writing papers, one of the must-have tools is some sort of document management system.

Iyer’s solution is to use Emacs, Org-mode, John Kitchin’s org-ref, and Sebastian Christ’s interleave. I’ve written about all of those before but Iyer’s post ties them all together into a compelling workflow. If you haven’t already seen it, take a look at Kitchin’s video on org-ref. It shows how easy it is to add papers to your bibliography and—at the same time—download copies of the PDF.

Interleave lets you takes notes on the paper you’re reading. The notes are synchronized to the part of the paper they’re about. It’s a great way of making notes about a paper or, really, any PDF document.

Sadly, nothing can make reading or writing papers easy but using the tools Iyer discusses can largely automate most of the administrative chores. Iyer’s post is interesting and well worth a few minutes of your time. He has a section that shows you how easy it is to configure a basic system so you can get started using it right away.