I’ve recently created some functions in emacs to make exporting notes, slides, and handouts somewhat easier. I do all this using org-mode. I figure there are at least a few other people who might find this workflow of interest so I though I would document it here (it will also serve as a document of how all this works in case I forget in the future). I want to be able to turn something like the following: ...
I spend a lot of time writing and editing. I use a text editor for this. I’ve written before on why I think text editors are the best means for writing and editing one can have. But part of why a text editor can be so important is that they tend to be extensible or configurable (or both)—you can fit the editor to your needs. I use emacs, which is perhaps the most configurable and extensible text editor there is. ...
Suppose you want to keep a CV accessible in PDF, html, and perhaps other formats (e.g. docx). It’s a pain to do them all individually and keep them in sync. Here’s one way to avoid that issue, though it has a bit of initial work involved in setting everything up. What you want to do is keep your CV (or really anything of that ilk that you want to have available in multiple formats) in a YAML file and then use pandoc to convert the YAML file into whatever documents you need. I got the idea from looking at this template on Github. ...
Academic writing typically requires writing something in drafts. Many drafts. Until recently there have been few ways of elegantly handling this. Often, one would need to title the current draft with the day’s date, then save this draft in a folder (named, e.g., “drafts” or “versions”), and do this every time one sits down to write. This works, in some ways. The data is there. The problem is that you quickly end up with a folder (or desktop’s) worth of files. These filenames have typically ridiculous and increasingly obscure titles (e.g. final-draft-final-revision\final-draft-04-2018.docx). And it is seldom clear, using this method, exactly what one did when, without actually opening a particular file and looking, or trying to remember when (and where) it was that one made the relevant change. ...