Re: Org mode for meeting minutes

[Christian Egli]

Hi Timm

Timm Lichte writes:

> Glad you find it interesting. I think both ways of taking notes have
> their merits and use cases. In small productive project meetings, I'd
> rather use more of the org-mode infrastructure. When there is a larger
> event with changing participants and its really important to document
> and keep track of what is going on, simple annotated lists fare better
> in my experience.

I think you are probably right. When taking notes quickly your approach
without having to fidget with Tasks is probably faster. I just did not
want to stray too far off plain org-mode notation.

>> If I understand correctly you are defining some kind of extra list
>> markup (is something a task or a decision, etc) and the you wrote a
>> custom exporter that produces fancy LaTeX for the minutes (well, if I
>> understand correctly it really is a custom exporter that generates
>> org-mode and then LaTeX from there).
>
> Yes, I'm basically extending the syntax for descriptions and
> overlaying it with some convenient font-lock. My custom exporter
> pushes everything in a temporary buffer and replaces the minutes
> notation with LaTeX expressions and then starts the regular
> org-export. This probably looks awkward but gives me full flexibility.

Well, it might look weird, but I think the idea is good. TBH, I'm not
sure if there is another (programatic) way to derive from an existing
exporter.

> The LaTeX document is just a list of sections with nested itemize
> environments. One item would look like this:
>
>     \item \ActionTag{Peter}{::} \ActionTagMargin{Peter}Something to do.
>
> I've pushed the TeX file of the example to the repository. Hope this
> makes it clearer.

Ah, yes, this makes it much clearer. I really like this.

> I'm really hesitant to make this a MELPA package right away, if this
> is what you mean. The font-lock and everything is really individual
> and non-generic. But I'll think about it.

I understand. Now that I think of it it might be better to package the
LaTeX commands into a package on CTAN. I looked at the various LaTeX
minutes packages and so far yours seems almost the nicest.

Thanks
Christian

--
Christian Egli
Swiss Library for the Blind, Visually Impaired and Print Disabled
Grubenstrasse 12, CH-8045 Zürich, Switzerland