[emacs-humanities] reading, writing, and research with Emacs in 2023

[David O'Toole]

Good morning everyone.

On Tuesday, December 27th it will have been exactly 100 years since
Clarence Irving Lewis read his paper "A pragmatic conception of the *a
priori*"[1] at the meeting of the American Philosophical Association. To
commemorate this occasion I have embarked upon a year-long project to write
several philosophical essays, the centerpiece of which will be a
retrospective of Lewis' ideas on the *a priori* and how these ideas might
be adapted to the needs of the working philosopher in the present day.

Naturally I am using GNU Emacs with OrgMode. :) and would love to discuss
technical details here. In particular I am documenting my setup, and would
like to learn more about what people are doing here too. I've just taken my
first look at the Binder page and it looks really nice.

One of the coolest things I've found is pdf-tools. In addition to being
much faster than DocView, it supports annotations and highlighting, which
will be useful for my project. I also like org-noter and use it in
conjunction with pdf-tools. Lastly for now I'll mention the ox-epub add-on,
which converts Org documents into EPUB format. I didn't know this existed
until recently, and it seems to work very well.

Of possible interest to this group is my project Org-fleuron[2], a new
web-based add-on for OrgMode and Org-info-js[3] which adds significant
functionality to the browser experience of Org-published HTML documents. My
research notes[4] are in the same org file as the essay outline, which
gradually gets fleshed out with more text until it becomes the finished
work, at which point the notes subtrees will be tagged "noexport" so that
they can be omitted from the HTML output. By making Org-info-js usable on
tablets and phones, I can publish my notes (and the final document)
anywhere and more easily share them with anyone. (I think the experience is
nicer on the desktop computer, too.) I also have custom Org agenda export
but this is not quite ready for prime time yet.

This email is too long, so I'll wrap up. I hope everyone has a safe and
merry holiday! And a happy 2023 too.

[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/2939833
[2] https://davidotoole.info/fleuron.html#org5dc18bc
[3] https://orgmode.org/worg/code/org-info-js/