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+[[!meta title="Org-mode and FoilTeX - an unlikely (but useful) combination for teaching - Tom Faulkenberry"]]
+[[!meta copyright="Copyright © 2019 Tom Faulkenberry"]]
+
+[[!template id=vid
+src="https://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/emacsconf/2019/emacsconf-2019-06-org-mode-foiltex-combo-for-teaching--orgfoils--faulkenberry.webm"
+type="video/webm"]]
+
+### Download
+
+- [Video](https://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/emacsconf/2019/emacsconf-2019-06-org-mode-foiltex-combo-for-teaching--orgfoils--faulkenberry.webm)
+- [orgFoils](https://github.com/tomfaulkenberry/orgFoils)
+
+### Transcript
+
+- Hi my name is Tom Faulkenberry and I am a mathematical psychologist
+ and professor at Tarleton State University in Stephenville, Texas.
+ My talk is about using something that's kind of old, a lot of people
+ don't think about it any more, with something new, like Emacs
+ Org-mode. Particularly I'm going to talk about using FoilTeX in
+ Emacs Org-mode. So first I want to give you a little bit of
+ background about what this is and why you would want to do it. As
+ you can see I have some things available for you on a GitHub repo.
+ The address you can see up here, is
+ <https://github.com/tomfaulkenberry/orgFoils> with the F
+ capitalized. So if you go there you'll see this README and it kind
+ of tells the story, I've been using Emacs for a long time and even
+ before that I was using LaTex in my graduate studies in mathematics.
+
+- Now with the advent of Org-mode many of us know that we are able to
+ combine the efficiency of using an Emacs workflow, and particularly
+ the markdown language that's provided by Org-mode, with the
+ mathematical type setting power of LaTeX, and so there are standard
+ ways to export Org-mode into LaTeX-type documents. Particularly
+ this works for presentations, and of course I'm a professor so I
+ make a lot of presentations, both at conferences as well as for
+ classes that I teach. Now I found that Org-mode did this very
+ nicely, as long as you were willing to use the ?Beamer? class, so if
+ I wanted to make things that were horizontally oriented and use the
+ standard color schemes in ?Beamer? then Org-mode export works fine
+ for that. But I have to admit I longed for simplicity of old days
+ of using LaTeX, where we made slides for - okay I'm going to date
+ myself here - but we made slides for overhead projectors that were
+ in a portrait orientation, and they just didn't have a lot of
+ decoration on them.
+
+- They kind of got to the point, they showed some mathematics, they
+ showed some things, and that was about it.
+
+- Well those were made back in those days using something called the
+ FoilTeX package, I've provided a link here on this README. You can
+ see if we go to the package for FoilTeX it hasn't been updated since
+ 2008, and even before that it went six years between updates. This
+ is not by any means an active development package. Rather it is
+ something that is old, it is archival but it is still distributed
+ with the full installation of LaTeX. So back to the point, why do
+ we care about this? Well, it's a pretty simple way of making
+ presentations, but Org-mode won't do it without a little bit of
+ hacking. So the point of this presentation is to show you that it
+ can be done, to show you that you can actually make very nice
+ presentations for both conferences as well as teaching notes, and
+ teaching slides, with just a little bit of work on your .emacs file.
+ So before I show you how that works, and it's all documented here on
+ the GitHub repo, I want to just demonstrate it in action, so I'm
+ going to flop over to Emacs real quick. Here is a document, there
+ is a copy of this document in the GitHub repository that I mentioned
+ about, so as you can see it does seem to follow the structure of a
+ standard Org-mode document.
+
+- At the top we have some header matter that I will explain in just a
+ second, and then we have these lists that begin with asterisks, and
+ if we tab them you can see that there's text underneath these.
+ These sections, if you will, will each turn into separate pages on
+ my lectures notes. So I've got several, this is for about a two
+ hour long course, so how does it turn into a pretty document that I
+ can then take to my course with me?
+
+- Well it works just like any standard Org-mode to LaTeX export. We
+ type C-c C-e which then provides us with this export menu, and as we
+ can see here to export to LaTeX and then a resulting PDF file I can
+ type l and then o and I do that and it will generate my LaTeX file
+ as well as open it for me and we'll see that pop up. Okay. And let
+ me go to the very beginning. This is what it looks like. Let me
+ scroll or zoomout a little bit so you can see the full page. So
+ these are in portrait orientation, I use my lecture like this
+ because usually I'm giving a lecture on an, not an overhead, but a
+ document camera where I'll take the paper with me and I'll have some
+ things written but I'll also have some space to write additional
+ things throughout the class. So sort of a hybrid between a chalk
+ talk if you will and a formal presentation.
+
+- And so as you can see this is nicely done with some readable fonts,
+ using LaTeX type type-setting, so it's really good for mathematical
+ content, and I found it's just a really clean way of doing things.
+ So that's what it looks like. So the question is how do you do
+ this, how do you generate this and get your Org-mode and Emacs set
+ up to work this way. Well I detail this in the GitHub repository.
+ There are two things you need to do to make this work. First is you
+ need to edit your .emacs file to include this codeblock. So this
+ codeblock is, I'll show you on my .emacs file, it doens't really
+ matter where it goes, I usually put it somewhere in the middle. Let
+ me open that just real quick for you.
+
+- My .emacs file's got some stuff in it and if we go down to about
+ right here you can see that code chunk is right here. So that code
+ chunk is what it takes to make that exporting that I demonstrated
+ work. You can see it here it basically does two things. First is
+ it defines a Foils class, that you can call in the Org document, and
+ then it maps your section header, that asterisk, to the FoilTeX
+ command which is Foil head. So if you type all of this in your
+ .emacs and then reload that you will be able to then turn the
+ example Org mode document into a nice set of lecture notes. The
+ other thing that you need to include, is you need to include a
+ document header.
+
+- Now this is kind of a barebones header, I will say that strictly
+ speaking, not everyone of these things is required, for example, you
+ do not need this `\usepackage{amsmath}`, unless you are using some
+ fonts or things that are in that package.
+
+- Another thing is this little bit of LaTeX command, this makes it to
+ where my paragraphs don't indent, which for presentations and
+ lecture slides I prefer. There are also some class options, I do
+ mine portrait, but if I'm giving a presentation at a conference
+ those are usually done via computer projector, so I would turn that
+ into landscape. And also this 17-point font you see, that's the
+ size that works nicely for me, but there are other font sizes
+ available in FoilTeX that you can use. All of those are detailed in
+ the FoilTeX manual which I've provided a link to for you here.
+
+- Finally, in this repository I do give you the Org-mode file itself,
+ it doesn't render nicely in the browser but you can clone this
+ repository and pull it up in your Emacs just fine, and then finally
+ the resulting PDF I showed you is also living in this GitHub repo.
+ So, it's a little bit slow right now, but it's there. I'm moving it
+ around too much as you can see. But anyway there is, so if you
+ think this is interesting and something you might like to do I
+ certainly welcome you to contact me by or by Twitter, there's my
+ email address and my Twitter handle. This I think is a really cool
+ thing and I hope that you do too. If you want old-school type LaTeX
+ ability with new-school Emacs Org-mode this is the way to do it. So
+ hope you enjoyed it and I look forward to talking with you further.