Hey folks,
I’m wondering how you go from multiple nodes to a publication.
I have a few related zettels and now I want to process them and turn them into a final document. How do you do it?
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Maybe… org-transclusion? (I am the author).
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I’m facing the same question and so far my ideas have led me to use your org-transclusion library. Thank you!
I think using transclusions to combine atomic notes into a cohesive unit for publication is good. Now I’m unsure though how such files will evolve over time. My plan is to write to such transclusion outline notes intermittently, similar to Incremental writing - supermemo.guru, and so given enough time the number of transclusions and the complexity of such notes will increase .
My questions is, if I want to use such transclusion notes for publication then how do I proceed with different publication types. As the size increases then I have to summarize it or re-formulate tailored to the publication type. A tweet isn’t the same as a book after all, and to condense enough thoughts to fill a book down into a tweet seems quite the task.
Anyways I’m still discovering a process right now too, so I’m interested in what others are doing.
@nobiot I’m using your transclusion module; thank you!
However, transclusion assumes that the node is its final form which is usually not the case. While the idea is well defined, the writing needs to be refined to fit into the new document…
I’ve been eyeing zettledesk have you ever used it or similar?
@letmediscussthis @dmitrym, Thank you both. I am glad some of what I do is useful to others.
I see what you mean and I share the the same sense that the notes you assemble into one document are not in their final form. My original idea for org-transclusion was (and still is) that you would assemble notes into a single document as a quick draft. You might try different sequences to see which tell the whole argument or story in the way you want. As you say, you would then keep refining the write-up. To do this, you could use org-transclusion-detach. At least, this is the idea behind org-transclusion as a package.
In the pre-COVID time, I wrote and published a book (in a completely different field from Emacs or programming) and used org-transclusion while doing so. It has been about 3 years since, and my writing purpose and method have also evolved. I am not using org-transclusion for assembling notes into a draft – this is no longer my workflow. I don’t even use org-mode very often. I usually use txt files. I only browse through my notes (both digital and analogue in physical notebooks), and start from a blank page when I want to write a draft. I sometimes copy-and-paste bits and pieces but, at least at the moment in 2024, I do not use (transcluded) copies of my notes. My written pieces are not long – equivalent of 1000-1500 words in English. Maybe I prefer this way only because what I write is very short. I still maintain org-transclusion, though, at a reasonable pace I can maintain (November-December have been unfriendly to my private time for my packages, but I will come back to them soon).
No, I haven’t used it. But I am aware of it – zetteldesk has a custom integration with another package that I wrote (org-remark) for marginal notes. I think Emacs users are blessed with so may options with and without use of Org-mode. I like the concept of zk.el and ZK-desktop, for example, but I have not used either of them.
My preference at the moment is to go back to the basics and experiment with my own ideas and method at my own pace.
I wasn’t aware of org-transclusion-detach, this might be sufficient for what I’m looking to do.
I’m working on a presentation, essentially summarizing a book. I’m using org-noter to extract the salient points and rephrase them in my own words which is working fairly well to extract the content.
The next step is to generate the presentation slides. This is where I’m a bit stuck right now. I think org-transclusion-detach will help me here, otherwise it’s a lot of copying & pasting.
I’m surprised that you’ve moved away from a tool-based approach to authoring (eg org-transclusion) to a more manual approach. You say that your writings are short (like blog posts?). Do they contain a singular idea? Therefore maybe they don’t benefit from the zettelcasten approach?
I use notes as a “prototype” of my longer written pieces (“longer” but still 1000-1500 words) as well as collections of factual information, outcome of research. I try to write many sentences to give shape to my stream of thoughts, and some of them are repeating what I wrote a while ago (and I may not realise this until I review my notes across the time horizon). I also practice incremental note-taking – I may visit the same notes, add more to them, rewrite some, create marginal notes, and link to other notes and pages. I do all this digitally on Emacs and iPad, and on physical notebooks. This is my adaptation of Zettelkasten and reading recent (after Roam Research in 2019) materials surrounding it.
Just to illustrate what sort of writing I am doing at the moment, my most recent written pieces (those short ones I mentioned) are reviews of Japanese novels written in Japanese. This is only a hobby with a friend of mine; we exchange these reviews with each other, and then write more pieces about our own reviews. We are planning to publish these in a zine. I am no academic in literature, but I try to have a single “thesis” in each of my reviews. To “defend” my thesis, I include many ideas and researched facts (but still within 1000-1500 English words equivalent). So, I suppose my written pieces have more than a singular idea.
In any case, I strongly feel I have finally found an approach to note-taking and writing that fits me well. This feeling came on 2 November this year after years of conscious efforts with Emacs, Org-roam, and others since 2020 (and ever since I started being conscious about note-taking in plaintext around 2011).