Org in 4 Sections (plus a demo) civilized text file editing

Org is an Emacs mode, so you need Emacs and the Org package.

Windows

get emacs from ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/windows/

Mac

Use Mac Ports (macports.org) (port install emacs)

Linux

get emacs via your favorite package manager

Windows

The Org-mode files come with the Emacs installation from ftp.gnu.org

Mac

Use Mac Ports and install the org-mode package (port install org-mode)

Linux

Either the Org-mode files will come with the Emacs you install, or you can get them from the package manager

It's all emacs, so configuration is done in your ~/.emacs file.

(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.\\(org\\|txt\\)$" . org-mode))
(add-hook 'org-mode-hook 'turn-on-auto-fill)
(require 'org-latex)

Those three lines will:

• enter org-mode when you open a file ending in .org or .txt
• turn auto-fill-mode on in Emacs when you're in org-mode
• import org-latex

You can also enter org-mode by typing Esc-x or Meta-x followed by typing org-mode.

When typing in emacs, you can re-wrap lines of text with Esc-q or Meta-q.

• It is plain text, so a section is set up with an asterisk * at the start of a line, a subsection is two asterisks ** at the start of a line, etc.
• A bulleted list is started with any of a dash -, a plus +, and sublists are just indented.
• A numbered list is started with numbers. Sub-lists with numbers are intented one or more spaces.

* Section Title

  Some text that I would like to add.

  The second paragraph of the text I'd like to add.
  # this is a comment
  Here is a list
   - item one
   - item two
     - subitem one

  ** Sub-Section Title
   1. item one
   2. item two
     1. item two-sub-one

|--------------------+---------+------+----------|
| Car Make           | Cost    | City | X-factor |
| and Model          |         | MPG  |          |
|--------------------+---------+------+----------|
| Fiat 500           | $19,000 |   30 |        6 |
| VW Bug             | $26,390 |   20 |        7 |
| Volvo C70          | $39,950 |   20 |        5 |
| Audi A5 Cabrio     | $42,000 |   22 |        9 |
|--------------------+---------+------+----------|

Move to the top of your files and type Ctrl-c, Ctrl-e then press t to insert an export template that you can edit to create a title, author, and set some export options.

The export template for the slide version of this document is these lines (plus the default lines in the export template):

#+TITLE:     Org in 4 Sections (plus a demo)
#+AUTHOR:    Andrew Caird
#+startup: beamer
#+LaTeX_CLASS: beamer
#+BEAMER_FRAME_LEVEL: 2
#+latex_header: \mode<beamer>{\usetheme{Frankfurt}}

Generating PDF requires a LaTeX installation.

Windows

http://miktex.org/download

Mac

http://www.tug.org/mactex/

Linux

your favorite package manager

Type Ctrl-c Ctrl-e to see the export menu and choose from one of these options:

[h] export as HTML  [H] to temporary buffer
[R] export region   [b] export as HTML and open in browser

Type Ctrl-c Ctrl-e to see the export menu and choose from one of these options:

[a/n/u] export as ASCII/Latin-1/UTF-8
[A/N/U] to temporary buffer

Pandoc isn't an Emacs or Org-mode tool, but it is a file conversion tool that is aware of Org-mode and can convert to and from many, many formats.

For more information, see johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/.

The best resource is orgmode.org, and from there the most useful document is the 39-page document The compact Org-mode Guide, and you likely won't need all 39-pages. The full Org-mode manual is also there, but it can be quite dense.