Re: Org Tutorials need more structure

[Eric Schulte <schulte.eric@gmail.com>]

Joseph Vidal-Rosset <joseph.vidal.rosset@gmail.com> writes:

> Hi,
>
> 2013/9/28 Suvayu Ali <fatkasuvayu+linux@gmail.com>
>
>> Your example is not beginner's tutorial at all!  Nor is it something
>> that the manual can cover.
>>
>
> I do not understand why. Every beginner intested in org-mode is interested
> for such or such application, and that's a strange reply to make to a
> beginner like me to reply : "sorry but your request is not a beginner's
> request". And if I am interested in org-mode mainly for the feature?
>
>

Org-mode is an application for the following (from the manual).

> Org is a mode for keeping notes, maintaining TODO lists, and doing
> project planning with a fast and effective plain-text system.

Email is not mentioned in this description and is not core to what
Org-mode does.  I think the point made in the previous email is that
your use case is neither basic nor typical Org-mode usage.

>
> I have not found a clear tutorial to help me on this point, and even in the
> org-mode manual, the relationship between org-mode and emacs email client
> like gnus is very difficult to understand. Again, I have not seen an easy
> example to follow.
>

The feature (sending email with embedded equations compiled from latex)
is provided by org-mime, which is a contributed package build on top of
Org-mode.  It is not mentioned in the Org-mode manual because it is
*not* part of Org-mode, it is built on top of Org-mode.

See [1] for a tutorial on using org-mime.  Sometimes when using a tool
like Org-mime which leverages other tools (e.g., message-mode and
org-mode) it is necessary to learn all of the sub-tools at once which
can result in a great deal of reading, there's no way to avoid this.

>
>
>>
>> Now to answer your question, I have seen people mention htmlize.el from
>> contrib for something like this.  To integrate with LaTeX, you should be
>> able work out a solution with some dvipng magic.  If memory serves me
>> right, there was a post from Eric[1] mentioning how to use htmlize from
>> gnus, and a thread on dvipng in the last month.  Those might help you.
>>
>
> Thanks for this reference, I have tried these commands on a draft in my
> gnus, of course nothing work. I suspect that I need to configure gnus
> before...
>

I doubt this is related to your gnus configuration.  Please try the
tutorial linked below, and if you run into a problem then provide a
complete reproducible recipe for what you've tried and how it failed and
maybe we can help you to use these packages.

>
> My point in this discussion was to pointing out that it is not only
> structure of tutorials  can be a problem, but the content of explanations.
> Again, if no example is given for each task that one can realize with
> org-mode, only geeks expert in emacs will be able to read manuals for
> org-mode, and in my opinion it's too bad.
>

There is a need to balance between spending time spent documenting and
spending time developing (fixing bugs and adding features etc...).  More
documentation and more examples in the documentation would be welcome,
but given the time constraints of Org-mode developers and contributors
not every desirable task can be accomplished.

Cheers,

>
> Best wishes,
>
> Jo.


Footnotes: 
[1]  http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/org-mime.html

-- 
Eric Schulte
https://cs.unm.edu/~eschulte
PGP: 0x614CA05D