[emacs-humanities] Introduction

[Juan Manuel Macías]

Hi everyone,

I am glad to see that this list about Emacs and Humanities has been
created. I introduce myself. I've been using GNU/Linux and Gnu Emacs
since around 2007. In recent years I have been making Emacs almost my
only work environment. I have no "academic" computer training; rather,
everything I have been learning has been self-taught and reading the
documentation here and there. I like to write Elisp to solve specific
challenges of my work. Naturally, it is a code that can always be
improved, because every day in Emacs is another school day. But over
time I have developed a strange love towards Elisp, from my humble
ignorance, something that I have never felt towards other languages ​​that
I have tried a bit, such as Python, Perl or Lua.

My fields of work include the philology of classical languages, ancient
and modern Greek, poetry, literary translation and editorial production
together with typesetting and everything related to the ancient art of
printing. As a translator I have published here in Spain a translation
of the complete Poetry of Cavafy; I have also translated Sappho,
Karyotakis, Maria Polydouri and other ancient or contemporary Greek
poets. I am currently working on a translation of Homer's Odyssey. And
Emacs with Org Mode are always an invaluable help to accomplish all of
that. Of course, I have no doubt that Homer would have used Emacs...

In the realm of editorial production and typography, I am a strong
supporter (in a world dominated by InDesign and other proprietary
software) of the TeX ecosystem, which I love as much as I love Emacs.
Lately I have developed a workflow for typesetting and book production
where Org Mode and Org Publish play an important role, as a kind of
high-level interface to LaTeX. In this regard, I can cite a work in
progress that I am carrying out, the composition of the Hispanic
Dictionary of the Classical Tradition, a multidisciplinary reference
work (in which various authors, universities and institutions are
involved), of almost 1000 pages, carried out all from Org Mode and
composed in the final process using LuaTeX, although there will also be
an HTML version.

I hope I can be helpful in these and other tangent fields, and it will
also be nice to be able to exchange ideas and experiences. And of course
it will also be a pleasure to continue learning from all of you :-)

Best regards,

Juan Manuel