Literate Documentation with Emacs and Org Mode
Channel: spudlyo
Date: 11/12/2023

All the materials for this talk can be found at: https://gitlab.com/spudlyo/orgdemo2

When writing about programming or other technical subjects, you’re often weaving blocks of source code, program output, and raw data in with your prose. These supplementary materials are usually copied and pasted into your document from other sources, which can be difficult and tedious to keep up-to-date as things change. Inconsistencies and errors can easily creep in when you “hard-code” dynamic information like program output into your writing.

Wouldn’t it be great if the tool you used for writing knew how to run code in a variety of programming languages, collect and format output, and let you refer symbolically to all this dynamically generated content in your prose? In this talk I’ll demonstrate how to use GNU Emacs’ Org mode to create technical documents that do just that. We’ll explore the features of Babel, Org mode’s literate programming add-on, that makes it convenient to edit, evaluate, and manage embedded code, output, and data all from inside GNU Emacs.

We'll also show how these literate documents can be exported to LaTeX and ultimately PDF format to create professional looking output that looks stunning when printed or viewed.

Note: This is an updated version of the talk I gave at SeaGL 2019 that features new techniques and workflow improvements I've developed over the intervening years.