Time after time I write technical blogs and articles that describe and summarise my experiences. Nowadays all the blogging sites and tools offer WYSIWYG editors. And it makes blogging so easy, right? Not for me! I always find WYSIWYG editing tedious and frustrating.

1. Easy Blogging With Emacs
Time after time I write technical blogs and articles that describe and summarise
my experiences. Nowadays all the blogging sites and tools offer WYSIWYG editors.
And it makes blogging so easy, right? Not for me! I always find WYSIWYG editing
tedious and frustrating.
Table Of Contents
• Why WYSIWYG sucks
• Org-mode of Emacs
• Installing Emacs
• Using org-mode for writing documents
• Publishing the document
• Converting the document to PDF
Why WYSIWYG Sucks
One reason is that you have to make manually every single change (no styles like
CSS for example), which makes the process tedious, error prone and inconsistent.
If you decide later to change some styles, you have to go all over the document
and modify all occurrences one by one… Oh man, better don't touch it at all!
But the worst thing about WYSIWYG is that actually its last name is WYGIANWYW
(What You Get Is Almost Never What You Want). I have struggled many times with
the editor because it would never understand correctly what I wanted and would
display a totally broken formatting (long live undo that comes quickly to the
rescue).
So, I'd rather write plain text HTML than use WYSIWYG editing, unless the
structure and formatting of the document is very simple. Maybe not everybody
finds WYSIWYG so difficult and annoying, but the technical blogs (articles,
documents, etc.) that I write are a bit long and with complex structure, and
WYSIWYG would never be suitable for me. I have also tried different wiki systems,
which in a sense are better than WYSIWYG, but still they are a bit simple and do
not support all the features that I need.
Org­Mode Of Emacs
After trying different tools and systems, I decided that the orgmode of Emacs is
the best for my needs. Quoting from its webpage:
"Org mode is for keeping notes, maintaining TODO lists, planning
projects, and authoring documents with a fast and effective plain-text
system."
So, among other things, org-mode can be used for authoring documents, that is
writing blogs, articles etc.

2. It has a wiki-like syntax that is lightweight but also complex (not-simple).
Combined with the editing power of Emacs it becomes a powerful tool for writing
blogs, articles and other docs. Then, it can be converted automatically to other
formats, like HTML, LaTeX, PDF, etc.
I will try to describe how I use it for my needs (writing blogs, articles, etc.)
Installing Emacs
On Ubuntu it can be installed like this: sudo apt-get install emacs On other
Linux systems it should be very easy too. If you are using Windows, then look at
the instructions on this page.
The latest versions of Emacs include org-mode by default, so there is no need to
do anything special for installing it. Just use the extension .org for the file and the
org editing mode will be enabled automatically.
Using Org­Mode For Writing Documents
Emacs is an advanced editing tool and org-mode has lots of features, however not
all of them are needed. For what we want to do (writing technical blogs and docs),
we need some very basic and simple things.
I will list the ones that I use most frequently:
• Paragraphs are marked by empty lines:
Paragraph1
Paragraph1 continued
Paragraph2
Paragraph2 continued
• Headings are marked by stars at the beginning of a line:
* Heading1
** Heading2
*** Heading3
** Heading2
* Heading1
** Heading2
• Ordered and unordered lists:
+ item-1
1. item-1.1
2. item-1.2
3. item-1.3
+ item-2
- item-2.1

3. - item-2.2
- item-2.3
+ item-3
• item-1
1. item-1.1
2. item-1.2
3. item-1.3
• item-2
1. item-2.1
2. item-2.2
3. item-2.3
• item-3
• Inline markup:
*bold*, /italic/, _underlined_, =code= and ~verbatim~
bold, italic, underlined, code and verbatim
• Hyperlink:
[[http://info.btranslator.org][B-Translator]]
B-Translator
• Preformatted:
#+BEGIN_EXAMPLE
Some example from a text file.
# +END_EXAMPLE
Some example from a text file.
It is so simple, intuitive and familiar, that you don't even need a tutorial and can
start using it right away.
You can find more about the markup that can be used, on the documentation of
org-mode (or try info org on the terminal).
As an example, you can see the org code of this document itself on gist: easy-
blogging-with-emacs.org
Publishing The Document
In order to publish the document, I do these steps:
1. First, convert it to HTML (with the emacs command: C-c C-e h).
2. Then open the generated HTML file in a browser.
3. And then copy/paste the content of the article from the browser to the
editor of the blog site.
I don't know why, but a copy/paste like this usually works very well. I use Blogger
for my blogs, but I think that it should work on other blog sites and WYSIWYG

4. editors as well.
After the copy/paste, I still have to do some minor manual corrections, but this is
much easier than writing the whole thing on the WYSIWYG editor.
Pay attention to these lines that are at the beginning of the org file:
#+OPTIONS: num:nil toc:t ^:nil f:nil TeX:nil LaTeX:nil
#+STYLE: <link href="css/org.css" rel="stylesheet"
type="text/css"/>
They control the look of the generated HTML file. The first one defines some
settings/options, like: don't number headers, generate a TOC, turn off TeX syntax
for subscripts, etc. More details and other options you can find on the
documentation for export settings.
The second line tells it which CSS file to use, so that the generated HTML looks
nice and beautiful. For a quick start, just download and use my org.css file, and
later you can customise it for yourself. For example, it defines the style of
preformatted text like this:
pre {
padding: 10px;
border: 1pt solid #AEBDCC;
border-radius: 5px;
background-color: #000000;
color: #eeeeee;
font-family: Ubuntu Mono, monospace, courier;
}
Converting The Document To PDF
Org-mode can convert directly to PDF. However there is no way (as far as I know)
to modify how the generated PDF file looks like. It always has the same standard
look of an old scientific paper (I guess that the conversion to PDF is done by
converting first to LaTeX).
I prefer to take another approach for generating PDF docs:
1. First I generate the HTML file (where I can control how it looks by
customising the CSS file).
2. Then I copy/paste from the browser to LibreOffice (yes, this copy/paste
works well too, preserving all the formatting and styles from HTML).
3. Finally save it as PDF. LibreOffice has a built-in PDF converter.
However, before the third step I do again some minor manual modifications. I also
define styles for headings, preformatted text, text body, etc.
One of the things that I change in LibreOffice/PDF document is the style of the
preformatted text. In the HTML version it is white font on a black background, and
this is good because it looks like a terminal. However PDF documents sometimes
can be printed and that style doesn't look nice on paper (and also it would
consume lots of ink), so I change it to black font on white background.

5. To apply the new style on a preformatted text, I select it, then from the list of
styles (on top-left) select "Clear formatting", then select the style "Preformatted
Text". I have to do this for all the preformatted texts. I do the same thing for
headings as well.
In order to not re-define the styles for each document, I open an old document,
replace its content with the new content, and then save it with a new name. This
will ensure that the styles of the new document are the same as the styles of the
old one. Maybe LibreOffice has some other means for defining the styles and
using them on each document, but I am not so familiar with LibreOffice and this
trick works anyway.
If you want to use my styles, you can download the .odt document from here and
use it as a template for your own docs.
Author: Dashamir Hoxha <dashohoxha@gmail.com>
Date: 12 July 2013
HTML generated by org-mode 6.33x in emacs 23

6. To apply the new style on a preformatted text, I select it, then from the list of
styles (on top-left) select "Clear formatting", then select the style "Preformatted
Text". I have to do this for all the preformatted texts. I do the same thing for
headings as well.
In order to not re-define the styles for each document, I open an old document,
replace its content with the new content, and then save it with a new name. This
will ensure that the styles of the new document are the same as the styles of the
old one. Maybe LibreOffice has some other means for defining the styles and
using them on each document, but I am not so familiar with LibreOffice and this
trick works anyway.
If you want to use my styles, you can download the .odt document from here and
use it as a template for your own docs.
Author: Dashamir Hoxha <dashohoxha@gmail.com>
Date: 12 July 2013
HTML generated by org-mode 6.33x in emacs 23