reddit / emacs

Org-mode and revising from printed page

copperbranch · 2022-08-28 11:00
A struggle that I often have writing prose in Org-mode (or in any text editor with a markup language) is when I need to review things. I like to review from a printed copy, I'm better at catching errors that way. I also enjoy the ritual of getting off of my computer, sitting on a desk with printed pages, a red pen, and a cup of coffee. For that, I'll export as latex-pdf or odt and print---no big deal. The problem is that when I go back to the computer to make the changes in the file, the positions of the words and sentences are naturally very different from the ones in the printed page. So I have to be constantly switching my view from two texts that are very differently formatted, and that is tiresome. So much so, that I will often make the changes in the odt file on Libreoffice Writer, losing my god-given editing shortcuts, and once they are all done, I'll copy the text and paste it back on my org file. But then I have to be careful with italics and other stuff that will change once I copy the text in the odt and paste it on org. If all I'm doing is writing some informal text, no biggie. But when on an academic writing, messing with footnotes I'd be playing with fire to work in that way. So I end up writing a lot of my academic writer in Writer instead of Emacs. The obvious easy solution would be to get used to review from screen, directly in the org file. But that wouldn't help whenever I have other people's review of my text, like advisors and other professors (and a lot of them will require something compatible to MS-Word anyway, for them to use track changes). So... any technical solutions of different workflows that I haven't considered? How do *you* deal with that?
sachac · 2022-08-28 12:57
When I edit, I usually use isearch or avy to jump to the words I want to change instead of navigating by line, so changes in line breaks don't bother me so much. Would something like that make it less tiring?
hhoverton · 2022-08-28 17:06
This was my thought too. Getting used to jumping to the lines rather than navigating manually would probably be the easiest fix that doesn't change the printed workflow
EFLS_ · 2022-08-30 19:56
Don't change to review on screen, in my experience reviewing text requires you to look at it 'anew'. I use a similar workflow (with reading the PDF on e-reader rather than printing). Just use search and type a few characters/words to jump to the required location and do your editing then.