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Comment by kingkongjaffa | Hacker News Reader

As a fellow Nord color theme enthusiast and evil moder, I approve of this project!

How do you do the free body diagrams though?

I couldnt see a section for those in the write-up.

I tried something like this when I was in university for Mech Eng.

In the end blasting through 1000’s of pages of paper notes and working examples by hand is what made things stick and helped me pass exams.

Its sort of like the saying “the ability to do the thing but the wisdom not to do it”

I cycled through every notetaking app and ended up on org-mode in end. Fancy tools don’t make you fundamentally better.

And I don’t think beautifully typeset LaTeX will help you learn better. (Although I love LaTeX and my bachelors and masters thesis were written in it.)

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Do you review/puruse/read all your org-mode notes straight from within Emacs itself? Do you ever convert them to HTML, PDF, EPUB, etc.? If you do, what tools do you use to convert org-mode to these alternative formats? If you don't, it's alright. Just want to understand your usage pattern.

Where I'm coming from: I used to take org-mode notes sometime back and push them to GitHub. Everyone told me GitHub can render org-mode, so it is going to be a great experience when I want to read my notes later and when I want to share the notes with others. But sadly the GitHub org-mode parser is terrible. Instead of just using Emacs itself to parse org-mode files, GitHub has reimplemented some half-baked org-mode parser in Ruby that breaks in all sorts of edge cases. So I can still write my org-mode notes in Emacs and review them in Emacs but I cannot really share them easily with other GitHub users as the initial claims promised it to be.

I'm unsure if either of these help you with regards to HTML and PDF?

https://orgmode.org/manual/LaTeX_002fPDF-export-commands.htm...

https://orgmode.org/guide/HTML-Export.html

I should add, this is `org-export-dispatch`, bound to C-c C-e by default. You can then press `lp` for PDF or `hh` for HTML.

Also, if you're interested, there are HTML themes here: https://github.com/fniessen/org-html-themes

You can use the ox-pandoc library to export from Org Mode in Emacs to 65 different formats (at time of writing) including all the ones you mention.

For some formats that pandoc does not output, there are also specialised ox-format libraries.

There are even several exporters to Github-flavoured markdown. I personally find both ox-pandoc and ox-gfm very useful for that purpose.

https://github.com/kawabata/ox-pandoc

I just view in emacd org mode and make use of org-agenda. My notes are only for me. My notes are backed in github but I’ve never wanted to read them on the site.

For documents that others should read and write, I use something else (ms word/ppt/Figma.

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