Backlink: §2020-02-15-1247 Welcome

Exporting notes is one way to conveniently read them outside of Emacs.

Zetteldeft provides functions to conveniently export notes. Exporting relies on Org-mode and the org-publish functions and revolves around zetteldeft-export--prepare-tmp-notes.

This function copies notes to temporary directory zetteldeft-export-tmp-dir and replaces Zetteldeft links with file links in the process. Org-publish then export these temporary notes to, for example, HTML.

Note: The current workflow only works with Org notes. Expanding this into Markdown should be easily achieved by modifying the preparation function. Get in touch if you’d like to attempt to do so.

(add-to-list 'org-publish-project-alist
  `("zd-tutorial"
    :preparation-function zetteldeft--export-prepare-tmp-notes
    :base-directory ,zetteldeft-export-tmp-dir
    :publishing-directory ,(expand-file-name "docs/" default-directory)
   ; publishing configuration
    :base-extension "org"
    :publishing-function org-html-publish-to-html
   ; org config
    :headline-levels 4
    :with-tags nil
    :with-toc nil
    :with-date nil
    :with-author nil
   ; html config
    :html-head-extra "<link rel='stylesheet' href='static/style.css' type='text/css'/>\n"
    :html-preamble ,(with-temp-buffer
                      (insert-file-contents 
                        (expand-file-name "docs/static/html-preamble.html"
                                          default-directory))
                      (buffer-string))
    :html-postamble nil))

Some pointers for people unfamiliar with Org-publish:

• :publishing-directory should be where you want your final notes to go
• :html-head-extra can be used to include styling
• :html-preamble is used here to include a header, but can safely be removed

The Org exporting features will try to resolve all Org style links and halt if deems one is broken. To still be able to export, it is a good idea to set org-export-with-broken-links to t.