Re: Org mode for meeting minutes

[Timm Lichte]

Hi Christian,

Am 24.03.20 um 11:04 schrieb Christian Egli:
> Hi Timm
>
> Timm Lichte writes:
>
> > Just for your amusement: I've developed a very different but effective
> > way of taking minutes with org-mode that uses just lists and
> > enumerations. I have been using this solution for more than a year on
> > a daily basis and I'm really happy with it (and colleagues don't
> > complain). Speed, simplicity and readability for non-emacsers is
> > critical in my job, so the solutions you are proposing would be
> > overkill.
>
> This is really interesting! I can see that you are very efficient with
> this. I think my solution is more using the standard org-mode
> infrastructure, I don't define any export for example.

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.

> > You can have a look at the style and code here:
> >
> >    https://github.com/timmli/org-minutes-dev
>
> 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.

> I don't quite understand how the LaTeX works. Is this some kind of two
> column layout or do you keep the action item markers and the assignees
> in the margin? Can you post the produced LaTeX?

The LaTeX template builds on the article documentclass and basically 
puts some of the item types also on the regular margin with \marginnote 
from the marginnote package.  Some of the important types are also shown 
in the outline using \addcontentsline.

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.

> > Any feedback is greatly appreciated. But keep in mind that the code is
> > not polished at all -- this is a hobby project of an elisp dilettante.
>
> It would be good to package this. The code would get more usage and
> you'd get more feedback.

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.

Best,
Timm

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