Hi, * intro ;(warning: orgstruct-powered e-mail...)
I recently published my final thesis, written entirely with org-mode: - description of the thesis: http://www.danielclemente.com/disk/disk.en.html - direct link to PDF: http://www.danielclemente.com/disk/disk.de.pdf - source file: http://www.danielclemente.com/disk/disk.de.org I started writing it in LyX but after some months I changed to org-mode. It was a risky change since org-export-as-latex was still in development, but thanks to Bastien all bugs were quickly fixed. It's not a complex document (no images, no formulas) but has lists, footnotes, bibliography (references) and other embedded LaTeX (including the preamble in a local variable). I haven't tried yet exporting it as HTML. ** experiences The change was really worth it: *** integration I could do everything inside emacs. That means, even without mouse, using my favourite key combinations. And with an integrated browser where I could look up words in the dictionary. *** outline The outlining function of org-mode was the most useful. It's wonderful seeing 60 pages condensed in one and at the same time being able to change each detail without much trouble. A problem was that each header doesn't give information about how much text it contains: at the outline you can see „Point 1" and „Point 2", but you don't notice that for instance that „Point 1" contains just half page and „Point 2" four pages; and that was important for me since I had to control the number of pages per section. *** tasks I could also track tasks. Each section started as some notes in Spanish, then I would translate it to German, and finally ask some German native speaker to revise the text. Each item went through „write"->„translate"->„correct"->„done". To track translations and corrections I used an additional section and normal lists. I didn't use properties at each trackable section because that was slower than copying the overview to a piece of paper and drawing possible distributions of the work there. This was because the assignments were complex to describe: ex. a person was correcting point 3 --except 3.2-- and point 4; another one was correcting 3.1, 3.3, 3.4 and 5 but just after point 3.3 is completely translated; etc. And I wanted to distribute work evenly; therefore I needed to write at each section how many pages it took. And this was easier with a „piece of paper", especially it didn't require much time to optimize. If I had to do this again, I would invest more time on learning „org-columns", since it provides a similar approach to what I did in the paper: for each section there's a column „person assigned for translation" and „person assigned for revision". ** Problems Problems I had with org-mode: - bugs or missing features of org-export-latex: but all which I reported where corrected by Bastien - the syntax of org-mode hindered me from doing what I wanted: - I couldn't write *1* *2* *3* etc. - it took a lot of hacks to write a number in brackets: [1] - things „like *this*" didn't work out of the box (and reached unnoticed the final version) - the processing of some characters wasn't very clear: ~ # \ $ etc. gave export problems Many of these syntax problems were already corrected ** end I hope that this encourages others to write more long articles with org-mode. It's possible and very comfortable; and the more work there is, the more it helps! Thanks for org-mode, Daniel _______________________________________________ Emacs-orgmode mailing list Remember: use `Reply All' to send replies to the list. Emacs-orgmode@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacs-orgmode
