Re: [O] Using orgmode to take "inline notes" for research

[John Hendy]

2011/4/12 John Hendy <address@hidden>:
> 2011/4/12 John Hendy <address@hidden>:
>>>
>>> Yes, you're right. You need the todonotes package. This is "standard" in my
>>> private class, reason why I forgot about this link.
>>>
>>> Go and add it, you'll love it!
>>
>> Holy cow. I kind of ignored this as I didn't know what it did, then
>> checked out todonotes and was blown away. This is amazing.
>>
>> ,---
>> | (latex "\\todo[inline]{\\textbf{\\textsf{%s %s}}\\linebreak{} %s}"
>> |                '((unless (eq todo "")
>> |                    (format "\\textsc{%s%s}" todo priority))
>> |                  heading content))
>> `---
>>
>> A couple questions:
>> - would you be able to even broadly tell me what the latex chunk is
>> doing there? Is %s like the %s in python (and perhaps other
>> programming languages)? I don't get where the third %s gets its value.
>> In other words, it seems that one of them is the heading value and
>> another is the content... but what does the third %s get it's value in
>> the first line?
>> --- Side note... maybe time for me to learn elisp?
>>
>> - I looked at the package and example and rather liked the side-page
>> type for small little notes. Sooooo cool. But, alas, removing the
>> '[inline]' gave me undefined control sequence errors. When I ran it
>> from the .tex file directly, it kind of worked, but my little box was
>> really smushed and off the page. I'm guessing that my desire for
>> narrower page margins isn't helping (I have geometry setting hmargins
>> to 2cm)?
>
> Confirmed: this does not play nicely with geometry. It's like the
> package shifts things away from where tikz expects the text to be. As
> I narrow the margins more and more, the lines that used to underline
> the text stay the same length and just get farther and farther away
> from actually underlining the text. Perhaps I'll just stick to inline
> notes unless there's some way to tell todonotes the margin size?

Sorry for the whiplash. This is *not* actually the case. todonotes
plays fine with geometry, but since I was exporting directly from the
.tex file, I needed to run pdflatex a few times until the lines
re-found their home. Org-export must re-run a few times and take care
of that. In any case, for future reference, this helps (I have this in
my setupfile):

,---
| #+latex_header: \usepackage[text width=Xcm]{todonotes}
`---

This might be obvious to some (and is, now, to me since I realize it's
using TikZ options), but I thought I'd add it for later-googlers'
sakes. You can specify a width for the box to be exported and tailor
it to your margins. Obviously, if your margins are narrower than your
longest word, it won't work, regardless, and the text will spill over
the todonote box.

Also, I found a pretty cool post (here:
http://jcl.posterous.com/latex-todonotes-and-margins) on temporarily
making the page and margins bigger to accommodate the notes. For those
using this just for notes, perhaps this isn't favorable if you want to
print. But for pure markup... it's a pretty neat workaround -- just
make your page as big as you need and add notes to your heart's
content.

I'll probably just stick to inline notes, but one other option is to
shift the text to one side, for example like so:

,---
| #+LATEX_HEADER: \usepackage[left=1.5cm, right=3.5cm,vmargin=2.5cm]{geometry}
`---

So this gives you the equivalent of 2 x 2.5cm margins, but shifts it
to one side so you can put notes on the right.

Hope this helps someone down the road.

Sebastien: my other questions re. how to interpret the code and
inserting proper linebreaks are still of interest!


Thanks!
John

>
>>
>> - Some of my notes are multi paragraphs, which I prefer non-indented
>> and separated by a line break rather than no line break and indented.
>> But when exported, multiple paragraphs just "stack up" with no line
>> break. Can I add this to your format?
>>
>>
>> Thanks again! What a neat package!
>>
>>
>> John
>>
>>>
>>> Best regards,
>>>  Seb
>>>
>>> --
>>> Sébastien Vauban
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>