On Thu, May 2, 2013 at 1:53 PM, Rich Shepard <[email protected]>wrote:
> I just discovered org-mode for emacs and am wondering how versatile and > useful it might be for my business marketing needs. Is anyone here using > this mode? Please share your experience and hints. > Hi Rich, I use org-mode daily for task management (and have for nearly three years now), but that's where I draw the line. It has some very sophisticated features, such as tables, scheduling, calendar integration, agendas, export to rich document formats (eg: wiki markup, LaTeX documents, Beamer presentations, etc...) However, when I've used it for those purposes in the past, three critical problems have come up: - Only other users with a very similar org-mode and emacs configurations can build the final documents. I've spent hours trying to figure out why emacs couldn't generate a pdf from an org file that worked fine on a different machine, to discover it was a /minor/ version difference in org-mode versions. - building documents, exporting to different formats, or doing any other document manipulation that utilizes the org-mode structure has to be done interactively. This is not a major issue for small documents, but as files grow, and you need to incorporate progressively more complex features (such as using bibtex, image conversions from formats such as svg to raster, and/or performing other build-time tasks -- evaluating source code to ensure accuracy, perhaps?) you'll run into trouble automating the build. This gets worse when you need to go back and build an old document, and you can't remember the 7-step process to get a result out, or when you go on vacation and someone else needs to do the same. - /once in a while/ the parser will become confused, and it's not always obvious when that has happened. I've lost significant content because I inadvertently typed "..." in the wrong place, and org conflated a top-level section. *If you notice* you can switch to fundamental mode and fix the syntax issues, but if you don't notice, you can end up deleting/moving more than you expect. This can range from merely annoying, to disastrous. That said, I find it's very hand as a TODO manager, and many people do swear by it, but I strongly caution anyone considering its use for complex / multi-person documents. --Rogan _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
