Uniquely url-ify sentences?

Uniquely url-ify sentences?

[Ross A. Laird]

Although most users of orgmode and emacs seem to be members of the
programming world, a few professional writers also use these tools (and
I cannot imagine why everyone else uses Word...). As a writer and
non-programmer, I have a task that is probably very simple for a
programmer but seems a bit complicated to me. It's something that could
be done in many different ways, but I'd like to do it in orgmode/emacs with the
simplest possible workflow. Here's the situation:

I have a narrative manuscript. I'd like to post one sentence from this
manuscript every day as a tweet with a link back to the sentence (and
then show the previous and next paragraphs of the manuscript on the page
that is linked from the tweet). The manuscript is in an org file (I also
have a version in LaTeX). Given my limited knowledge, I imagine I
could do this with a macro in emacs:

1. From the beginning of the first sentence, search to dot-then-space
(or zap to dot, or something similar).

2. Insert line break (or move sentence into another buffer).

3. Go to end of sentence and insert unique link anchor (main url plus
incremented line number or part of sentence or something similar).

4. Use the list of sentences with links as daily tweets.

This type of macro workflow would probably work, with some fiddling, but
I find that with macros there is always something to mess up the
workflow at some point. For example, in this case, there may be some
situation in which dot-space does not define the sentence precisely
(ellipses, say, or a sentence that ends with an exclamation). I predict
this will happen (it seems to happen every time with macros), and I
wonder if I should try some other approach.

What do you think might be the best way to do this? Is there a way to
uniquely url-ify sentences? If so, I could just create a second version
of the manuscript and url-ify the whole thing in one step. All I really
need is to create a unique anchor (#) for each sentence. The main url
can be consistent through the whole thing.

Feedback and suggestions most welcome.

Ross

-- 
Ross A. Laird, PhD
www.rosslaird.com

Re: Uniquely url-ify sentences?

[Jason Dunsmore]

ross@rosslaird.com (Ross A. Laird) writes:

> I'd like to post one sentence from this manuscript every day as a
> tweet with a link back to the sentence

Will this do what you need?

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
(defun org-linkify-sentence (url)
  "Converts a sentence to an Org-mode link."
  (interactive "sURL: ")
  (save-excursion
    (forward-char)
    (backward-sentence)
    (push-mark)
    (forward-sentence)
    (kill-region (region-beginning) (region-end))
    (insert "[[" url "][" (first kill-ring) "]]")))
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

Just put the cursor on the sentence and type M-x org-linkify-sentence
RET.  You might want to create a keybinding for it if you use it often:

(define-key org-mode-map "\C-cs" 'org-linkify-sentence)

Also, I'd recommend creating a link abbreviation if you link to the same
site often: http://orgmode.org/org.html#Link-abbreviations

I have a series of custom org-linkify-* functions that I use to convert
various pieces of text to Org-mode links.  I'm still trying to figure
out how they can be generalized to be useful to others.

Regards,
Jason

Re: Uniquely url-ify sentences?

[Bastien]

Hi Ross,

ross@rosslaird.com (Ross A. Laird) writes:

> Feedback and suggestions most welcome.

Jason replied -- did you get his code?

Thanks for confirming,

-- 
 Bastien

Uniquely url-ify sentences?

[Ross A. Laird]

Although most users of orgmode and emacs seem to be members of the
programming world, a few professional writers also use these tools (and
I cannot imagine why everyone else uses Word...). As a writer and
non-programmer, I have a task that is probably very simple for a
programmer but seems a bit complicated to me. It's something that could
be done in many different ways, but I'd like to do it in orgmode/emacs with the
simplest possible workflow. Here's the situation:

I have a narrative manuscript. I'd like to post one sentence from this
manuscript every day as a tweet with a link back to the sentence (and
then show the previous and next paragraphs of the manuscript on the page
that is linked from the tweet). The manuscript is in an org file (I also
have a version in LaTeX). Given my limited knowledge, I imagine I
could do this with a macro in emacs:

1. From the beginning of the first sentence, search to dot-then-space
(or zap to dot, or something similar).

2. Insert line break (or move sentence into another buffer).

3. Go to end of sentence and insert unique link anchor (main url plus
incremented line number or part of sentence or something similar).

4. Use the list of sentences with links as daily tweets.

This type of macro workflow would probably work, with some fiddling, but
I find that with macros there is always something to mess up the
workflow at some point. For example, in this case, there may be some
situation in which dot-space does not define the sentence precisely
(ellipses, say, or a sentence that ends with an exclamation). I predict
this will happen (it seems to happen every time with macros), and I
wonder if I should try some other approach.

What do you think might be the best way to do this? Is there a way to
uniquely url-ify sentences? If so, I could just create a second version
of the manuscript and url-ify the whole thing in one step. All I really
need is to create a unique anchor (#) for each sentence. The main url
can be consistent through the whole thing.

Feedback and suggestions most welcome.

Ross

-- 
Ross A. Laird, PhD
www.rosslaird.com