Miskatonic University Press

I’ve found a much easier way to manage my Poems to Memorize EPUB book, which is a pretty simple ebook listing a bunch of poems that I like to have at hand because I want to keep them memorized and sometimes I need to check on a line or stanza. (I explain more in this posting from January 2011.)

I used to generate it by hand, which of course is madness. Over the last few months I’ve become a big fan and daily user of Org mode, an Emacs extension that elevates even such an Olympian tool to heights hardly dreamt of by Athena herself.

Any road up, here’s what it looks like:

Exporting to LaTeX is easy: I hit the cryptic keystrokes C-c C-e l l (where C-c is “Control-c”):

Now that I have a LaTeX file, it’s one step to use Pandoc to convert it to EPUB. (I can’t export directly from Org right now, but perhaps that will be possible some day. In the meantime, crosswalking it through LaTeX isn’t bad.)

$ cd ~/epub/poems/
$ ll
total 76
-rw-rw-r-- 1 wtd wtd 25397 Oct  3 20:52 poems-to-memorize.org
-rw-rw-r-- 1 wtd wtd 29145 Oct  3 21:09 poems-to-memorize.tex
$ pandoc -o poems-to-memorize.epub poems-to-memorize.tex
$ ll
total 112
-rw-r--r-- 1 wtd wtd 25727 Oct  3 21:26 poems-to-memorize.epub
-rw-rw-r-- 1 wtd wtd 25397 Oct  3 20:52 poems-to-memorize.org
-rw-rw-r-- 1 wtd wtd 29145 Oct  3 21:09 poems-to-memorize.tex
$ file poems-to-memorize.epub
poems-to-memorize.epub: EPUB ebook data

No pictures in it yet, but maybe I’ll add some now that it’s so easy to manage.

M-x all-praise-emacs M-x all-praise-org-mode