I have the pad open. So, I can start.
Do you have occasions to use Emacs for multilingual text composition?
How do you deal with spell-checking?
I have written only in English. For English, Emacs works great.
Spell-check works great.
I have not used it for any other languages.
I have indeed tried local South Indian language, but only the script
I could get, but not the spell-checker, really. I've not really figured it out.
So that was my trial to answer the first question.
The second question is: "is it possible to align the subcolumns
and headings and subheadings?"
Oh boy. That's a good one. I actually felt the lack of having the...
The theme I had was great for... It looked like a novel
when I'm typing on the novel itself,
but when I expand into the subtrees,
it sort of goes haywire. It's a bit hacky.
You can probably switch to a monospace font,
and that works better than
the font that I have demoed it.
You can perhaps try monospace font
and it should work, I think,
as far as I know.
So, that's the second question.
The third question is maybe there should be an Emacs for Writing
mailing list, an online writer's workshop?
This is a great one.
I have conducted an online writer's workshop
here in India. Of course, it wasn't
an Emacs-focused workshop. We used Notion as the tool. It worked pretty good.
for people who are not aware of Emacs and how to use Emacs, the keystrokes,
the fact that I wasn't using the mouse unnerved them.
It was a scary experience for most people.
I had to switch to Notion.
People used that as a template
and then they could type it out.
It wasn't my perfect experience. I liked the Emacs Org Mode experience much better.
The next question is, "How do you share drafts of your novel?
If you use pandoc to export to Word, etc., how do you incorporate feedback
on the document back into Org?"
Thank you for the kind words.
Yes, it is a problem.
This is my ??, and I have a dedication to Spacemacs also and the Emacs Org Mode
community in there. I don't know if you can see it.
Probably not.
I did export it to Word.
My editor did complain that there were a whole bunch of things,
that it wasn't convenient for her.
So I tried having the raw Org Mode itself in a DOC embedded,
and I will do a copy and paste.
Didn't work so well either.
So I'm still on the edge on how do I do this.
Should I train my editor to use Org Mode
in Gitlab or one of those
other tools, which is not a great experience?
But... I don't know. It could be tricky for working with people
who are not well-versed with Emacs.
Pandoc is very, very useful in converting it to PDF
and integrating it with LaTeX, the styling, formatting into e-reader,
EPUB format. For all that, Pandoc works great. You can customize it
and of course there's a lot of support in the community
for any style changes that you want to make, any images that you want to add.
It works great.
That was my trial to answer the pandoc question.
"Can you show exported PDF of any of your novels?"
Unfortunately, it's still not published, so I'm...
I will put it and share it on the community,
or part of this in the schedule itself. Thank you for the question.
Unfortunately, it's not yet published, so I'm unable to publish the exported PDF.
But I'll make a test of an open-source novel that I'm working on
I will definitely publish that so that you can see
how it works also.
Can you text-wrap in the columns?
I have not found a way to do text-wrap in the columns.
That only shows my limitation in config setup,
but I'm sure people can figure this out
That's a good one. I would have loved to have it.
Every time I want to write more on the headline,
I would get out of the column-view mode and I would do the typing and expand it,
and then come back into the column view when I want to set the other meta parameters.
So that's how I manage without the text-wrapping feature built into column.
But I think it's a great idea to have text wrap.
Did I leave out any questions? I don't think so.
[Amin]: I think there's at least one question on IRC,
which I shall read to you.
[Bala]: Please, can you do that? Thank you.
[Amin]: So they asked, "How do you collaborate with others while writing your novel?
For example, sharing your file and getting feedback."
Okay. Good question. So far, I have used... Let's see...
What did I use... This is a crazy hack.
But it's a long-winded way of...
Right now we're working on an e-book for sustainability
and kids contribute their stories into this long Org Mode file
and I want my editors to see it
so what we have done, actually, is with the tags and all that, I have actually
pasted it into Google Docs
so that my collaborators and
editors can see it.
That's my current solution. It's not elegant.
I'm trying to see if I can use Python code to make the copy and paste work,
but it's not so elegant for now.
I don't know how to work this out,
but this is my hack. That is,
the entire Org Mode text, I would paste it into
Google Docs
so that my collaborators and editors
can see it. Whenever they edit it, I ask them not to make any changes
to the Org Mode tags.
So just copy the entire text
and put it back into my Org Mode file
and export it using Pandoc into a PDF
and since it's synced to Google Drive
it shows up in the Google Drive
and then the collaborators can see the PDF/EPUB
if they want to open it up
in their own space.
It's very very hacky and I think primitive, Stone Age sort of solution.
I did see a Python solution.
to at least help me with the copying and paste.
I'm still working on how do I convert this.
Interconvertability is driving me nuts.
I think most of the questions
are around interconvertability.
This is sort of what I have right now.
Any other questions, Amin,
on IRC or not?
[Amin]: Let's see. I think that's about it.
[Bala]: Okay. Cool. That was fun.
Thank you so much to
the organizers of Emacs conference,
and the community at large,
the Org Mode community and the Emacs community for helping me out.
Thank you so much.
Thanks for the opportunity as well.
[Amin]: And thank you, Bala, for your awesome talk.
[Bala]: Thanks. Thanks a lot, Amin.