Re: [emacs-humanities] Thematic analysis in Emacs

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Sun, 20 Oct 2024 12:53:57 +0000
> From: Jean-Christophe Helary <jean.christophe.helary@traductaire-libre.org>
> Cc: emacs-humanities@gnu.org
> 
> > On Oct 20, 2024, at 13:53, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
> > 
> >> Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2024 20:53:21 +0000
> >> From: Jean-Christophe Helary via Emacs-humanities 
> >> <emacs-humanities@gnu.org>
> >> 
> >> I’m (at last) entering a PhD course this month and have started working on 
> >> data from my MA.
> >> 
> >> I have about 30 hours of interviews (14 people, in Japanese) and I’m 
> >> wondering what’s the best way to do thematic analysis in Emacs.
> >> 
> >> I’ve first started with a spreadsheet in LibreOffice and stopped when I 
> >> saw how cumbersome the thing was going to become.
> >> I then moved to tables in Emacs and the difficulty of having word-wrapping 
> >> in cells stopped me after 5 minutes of searching on the web.
> >> 
> >> I’m left with using an org file, with titles, tags, etc. But I’m wondering 
> >> if it’s the best approach.
> > 
> > Please describe the problems you had with table.el.  AFAICT,
> > table-fixed-width-mode lets you have fixed-width columns with text
> > wrapping, so I'm not sure I understand the difficulties.
> 
> I created a table in org mode.

Did you try just table.el?  Like "M-x table-insert RET"?

> I started to copy-paste contents from my LO file.
> I realised that the contents were not wrapped (even though my general text 
> contents parameters indicate that I want wrapping).
> I checked the web to find a solution.
> The best answer on Stack Exchange was way too complex for something that was 
> just a checkbox away in LO.
> I moved on.

If I start with table-insert, set the column widths by typing some
text in each one of them, then invoke table-fixed-width-mode, I get
fixed column width with wrapping.