Monday Musings: Org-mode and BrainStorm

Org-mode is a great outliner/editor and I’ve been doing all my writing with it. The more I use org-mode the better I like it. But org-mode can’t do everything. BrainStorm excels at rapid sorting, reorganizing and brainstorming. Put org-mode and BrainStorm together and the synergy is terrific.

BrainStorm is a windows only program that I’ve been trying to get running properly on my Linux machine under Wine for almost four years. Wine released a new stable release earlier this month and BrainStorm is finally behaving.

I tried an experiment this morning. I used my portable AlphaSmart Neo for a freewriting session. When I was done, I dumped the file via USB cable to an org-mode file. Then I went through the file looking for interesting ideas, etc. Highlight some text, then press Ctrl-c x and the text is appended to a list in another buffer. When I reached the end of the text, I saved my list and fired up BrainStorm (BS).

Then I merged the list file with the file open in BS and sat down to play. BS has powerful tools for sorting and moving topics around, for creating order out of chaos which is what I did.

Now what? How to get my BS file back into org-mode? I wrote a perl script a few years ago that would take a tab indented file written from BS and create a file that I could load into Lyx (a front end for LaTeX). I spend hours trying to modify that program to translate the BS file into an org-mode file without success. I found a perl script on the old BS bulletin board that was posted there almost six years ago by Tony. His script takes a BS file and translates it so LaTeX understands it.

I took Tony’s perl script as the basis for a new perl script that makes an org-mode file out of a BS tab indented text file. It works! So now I have a two way street and can go back and forth between org-mode and BS.

I have high hopes for the synergy between these two programs. You might wonder what happened with MaxThink. Well, as good as MaxThink was, it’s too old, and has to run in a separate environment. I bought a licence for BS during the summer of 2006 because MaxThink was old and tired then. The reason I resurrected MaxThink was because the behavior of BS under the older version of Wine was quirky enough to keep me away. I’m happy that BS is working nicely now (knocking on wood). Stay tuned for further adventures.

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Org-mode for Writing: Structure & Focus

Org-mode is a structured editor that combines the best features of a powerful outliner and a powerful editor in one package. I’ve been fooling with org-mode a lot lately, digging into capabilities, solving issues and fine tuning, always asking the question — is org-mode the best environment for my writing? The answer is an unqualified yes.

Emerald Ring Outline -- click to enlarge

The illustration above is a screenshot showing the outline I used to write “An Emerald Ring,” a short story I wrote at the end of last year. Org-mode uses stars to distinguish heading levels, one star for the top level, two for the next and so on. You create a new headline by pressing either the Ctrl or Alt key together with the enter key. You cycle headline visibility using the Tab key.

As I progressed, I created a new top level heading for each new draft of my story with the latest draft at the top. The first four lines in this outline are structural markups that begin with #+. The markups don’t print. They tell org-mode what to do when the file or part of the file is exported to LaTeX, html or plain text. I put the latest draft at the top of the outline so that when I highlight the structural markups and the first headline, only the latest draft will be exported.

When you’re deep into writing a story, an article or even a book, and you have ideas, where do you keep the ideas so they don’t get lost? Well, I created headings for Story outline, characters and notes lower in the outline. I didn’t lose anything and my notes are right there when I need them.

The screenshot shows the outline partially expanded. Org-mode shows three periods after any headline that has subheads or text below. Yeah you say, all this is lovely but doesn’t it get kind of messy when you want to concentrate on writing a passage of plain text in the middle of an outline? Glad you asked because org-mode has a neat trick.

Focused headline -- click to enlarge

I put the cursor on the headline for the 8th draft and told org-mode to narrow the focus with a simple shortcut command. Here’s the screenshot. Try that one with your word processor. Now I have an uncluttered screen where I can write with no distractions. I wrote this post with org-mode using this trick. I created a new headline, told org-mode to narrow the focus and had a clean screen with the subject line at the top. Works for me.

There’s lots more to come. I figured out how to get the old DOS MaxThink and org-mode to cooperate but that’s another subject for another time.

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Monday Musings: Org-mode for Writing II

I want to be able to do all my creative writing in a single, plain text environment. Org-mode provides outlining and organization, so what’s next? Well, org-mode is an Emacs major-mode and Emacs, like most text editors was written with programmers in mind. Emacs only added a real word wrap (visual-line-mode) with the last version, an absolute must have for a writer. But printing from Emacs doesn’t do proper word wrapping. So, I dug around and found GNU enscript, a printing program that takes plain text and outputs to a postscript printer with word wrap and lots of other command line options that give me what I want.

Once I nailed down the options (margins, word wrap, extra vertical space between each line, page numbers where I wanted them,etc) I wrote a function (defun) that automated printing with enscript. I also reassigned a key combination and put both in my .emacs (config file). Now when I want to print all I need to do is highlight the text region and press Shift <print>.

I use org-mode to export to Latex and get a professionally typeset copy that’s far superior to anything you can get using a word processor. The latest version of org-mode can export to Open Office / LibreOffice format and if I wanted, I could save to Word format. I use org-mode to export to html and with a few tweaks to the html source and a run through kinglegen, I have a file that can be sideloaded into my Kindle. But for draft copies, I export as plain text and use enscript to print. The graphic at the top of this post is an example of a plain text printout. All this from plain text files that can be read and edited with any text editor.

So what’s next? I need to add some ‘rules’ and tools to my org-mode creative writing environment. I’ll keep the actual story text at the top of the outline with story or chapter as the top level headline then use the next level down for scenes. That’s it — two levels. Then I can use the rest of the outline headings further down for character sketches, plot ideas, notes or whatever strikes my fancy to keep things organized. It’s easy to export only the text but I don’t want headings so what to do?

I solved that issue earlier this evening when I built a regular expression (regexp) that can find all the scene headings:

^.*\*\*.*$

Org-mode uses asterisks to mark headlines, with first level *, second level ** and so on. The above regexp finds the entire line for each scene heading.

I can replace each instance with the latex markup (\bigskip) that puts extra vertical space between scenes. And I can also insert the Latex markup for no indent for the first paragraph of the new scene. Sounds complex but it’s not, especially since I’ll write a function to automate the process once I have it ironed out to my satisfaction.

Now that I know I can tweak org-mode, I’ll lay off for awhile and do some serious writing instead.

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