Hi Brian, Hi Torsten, > > I thought I'd muddy your waters by throwing a contrary voice into the mix > :-) > > NOOOO do not destroy my view of a perfect world.... ;)
> I've been refining the way I manage my college and uni teaching with > org for 5+ years, now. I am making extensive use of the scheduling and > TODO functionality. I am not storing course materials in the org > files. I found that I could not get by with just one teaching.org > file, but instead needed to break out each class into its own org > file. With everything in one, even on my pretty beefy box (quad core > i7, 8GB RAM) there was too much of a periodic lag when editing the org > file for that to be comfortable. On my netbook (which I take to the > office as the College insists I need a Windows box on my desk), the > lag made working with the file far too painful. I've not tried putting > my (extensive) LaTeX beamer slides sources, exams, etc. into the org > files, but I fear the lag would again occur. > Actually, that might be misunderstood. My aim is not to create a teaching.org file but many org-files, one for each topic. I totally agree a single org-mode file for an entire course would be really fast difficult to maintain. A complete course might consist of many org-files. Splitting the entire lecture in a similar way like an ordinary table of content. However, I would love to keep all infos of a certain topic within a single org-mode file together. Slides, lecture notes, exam questions, exercises, organisation, TODOs, ideas, maybe code, etc. > I've been keeping all course related material other than the org files > which manage scheduling into a seperate directory under git version > control and I link from the org file's scheduled tasks to the relevant > course related materials. It seems to be working in that I am halfway > through the term and am at most a week behind :-) Having those > materials in nested dirs in the filesystem is helpful, too; it allows > granular use of things like $git log . and that often gives me a > better sense of what I've been up to than would running git log > against one monster all in org file. > GIT will be definitely part of my toolchain independent of the usage of org-mode. > > I don't however too much by way of multiple outputs derived from > common sources. I let LaTeX beamer's facilities take care of prodicing > a display and a downloadable version of my slides. That just needs two > short master files which \include the body of the slides. What > duplication I have is in things like tests and paper topics when I > have multiple sections of the same course in a term, differing only in > section numbers and dates. The duplication is a bit inellegant, but it > is not extensive enough for me to worry about the overhead of avoiding > it. And, disk space is approximately free, at least if one is worried > about having duplicates of latex sources that generate a few pages. > > Actually, that is exactly what I am trying to figure out at the moment. How to generate a entire script or lecture slides from different org-mode files which contain not only one sort buy many different sorts of information. Thanks for the input, I guess we are more on the the same path rather then contrary. ;) Best Torsten
