Sometimes in the process of studying it is desirable to take the papers you are researching, which usually come as PDFs, and to convert them to an editable form. After you’re finished editing the final product could be PDF, Microsoft Word, web HTML, or something else. As this is a process that I’ve required for a number of different reasons, this tutorial covers the tools I use. Unlike other tutorials I’ve done, this process utilizes several tools beyond emacs.

At long last I’m producing the next of my “NOn-Programmer’s Emacs” (NOPE) editions. This post is companion to a Youtube video in the NoPE series. We’re looking at using Emacs (and in particular, Orgmode) for studying texts; in this episode of the series, we’ll be using as our example texts the LDS scriptures (official site) and some related texts. I’ve made the base files I use (org and plain-text of the scriptures) available here:

Emacs isn’t just for programmers; the majority of what I do in emacs is non-programming. This video shows just a few of my most common Emacs tasks. This screencast was made using RecordMyDesktop.