Irreal

In my Org Mode and Broken Links post I wrote about a problem with the way that Org 8 handles HTML links. If you want to know how great the Emacs Org Mode community is, read the comments to that post. First, David Maus, the developer who wrote much of the current escaping code, corrected my understanding of the problem: it’s not the escaping that’s the problem—it’s always been that way—it’s that the link was apparently not getting unescaped before export.

That was great information and pointed me to where I needed to look next: ox-html, the code that handles export to HTML. I’ve never looked at that code so I was dreading dredging through it. Happily, before I could begin, Rick, the maintainer of ox-html stopped by to report that he had pushed a fix for the problem.

Think about that for a moment. Someone on an obscure blog whines about a problem and two of the developers responsible for the code drop by to help out and fix the problem. It makes me love Org Mode even more and be grateful to be part of such a great community. A lot of this is probably true of many of the open source projects but, really, it’s hard to see how it could get much better than this.

Update: my understanding → corrected my understanding

As a couple of you have pointed out to me recently, HTML links in my posts are sometimes getting broken. That happens when the link has a parameter specified with a question mark and equal sign. For example, here’s a link to one of my blog posts that gets affected

Building a Blog with Org Mode

For some reason Org Mode has started escaping equal signs in links so that the above gets turned into

http://irreal.org/blog/?p%3D2168

which is, of course, incorrect. This happens in org-link-escape, which is called by org-make-link-string when I insert a link with 【Ctrl+c Ctrl+l】. No problem, I thought, they must have added the equal sign to the list of characters to escape; I’ll just fix it up with a buffer local variable or something. Unfortunately, when I checked I discovered that the equal sign has always been there and that neither org-link-escape nor org-make-link-string have been changed in over a year.

I put in a little bit of time trying to track down what changed (it didn’t do this in Org 7 and maybe even not in the early Org 8 versions) but couldn’t find anything. I’ll keep looking but in the mean time, here’s a little bit of Elisp that I threw together to fix things up:

(defun jcs-clean-link ()
  "Clean up munged = in an Org link."
  (interactive)
  (save-excursion
    (goto-char (point-min))
    (while (search-forward-regexp "\\[\\[[^]%]*\\(%3D\\)[^]]*\\]" nil t)
      (replace-match "=" nil nil nil 1))))

I can call that before exporting the Org file to HTML and everything will be fine. I may advise the exporting function to call jcs-clean-link for me but for now I’m doing it manually.

The whole thing has not been a total waste of time, though, because I learned two new things. First, calling 【Meta+x】 visible-mode shows the links as they really are rather than just the description part. I used to switch to text-mode to do this which is sort of a pain so this is a good find for me.

Second, although it doesn’t help me with the current problem, I discovered that you can set Org variables affecting export—even if they aren’t one of those supported by an option—with the BIND directive. To set variable to value, you just add the line

#+BIND: variable value

to your Org file. You also have to set org-export-allow-bind-keywords to t for this to work. Back when I thought my links were getting munged during export, I speculated that maybe XHTML Strict required the escaping and I was able to disprove that by using BIND to cause the file to be exported as HTML4.

If any of you know what’s going on with the links, please leave a comment.

As regular readers know, Irreal posts begin as Org Mode files that are subsequently published to WordPress with org2blog. This works very well for me but not everyone wants to run WordPress. For those of you who want to build your own blog, Bastien Guerry has a great post that shows you how to build and publish a blog from Emacs Org Mode.

It’s astounding how easy it is. Guerry walks you through the process from your first post to adding an RSS feed. What you end up with is a static blog and the associated RSS feed. In the spirit of eating his own dog food, Guerry publishes his blog this way. You can see the result by clicking on the home button at the linked post.

Guerry is an interesting guy and one of the heroes of Org Mode. For anyone interested in some background, I’ve written about him here, here, and here.