One reason is that you have to make manually every single change (no styles like CSS for example), which makes the process tedious, error prone and inconsistent. If you decide later to change some styles, you have to go all over the document and modify all occurrences one by one… Oh man, better don't touch it at all!

But the worst thing about WYSIWYG is that actually its last name is WYGIANWYW (What You Get Is Almost Never What You Want). I have struggled many times with the editor because it would never understand correctly what I wanted and would display a totally broken formatting (long live undo that comes quickly to the rescue).

So, I'd rather write plain text HTML than use WYSIWYG editing, unless the structure and formatting of the document is very simple. Maybe not everybody finds WYSIWYG so difficult and annoying, but the technical blogs (articles, documents, etc.) that I write are a bit long and with complex structure, and WYSIWYG would never be suitable for me. I have also tried different wiki systems, which in a sense are better than WYSIWYG, but still they are a bit simple and do not support all the features that I need.

After trying different tools and systems, I decided that the orgmode of Emacs is the best for my needs. Quoting from its webpage:

"Org mode is for keeping notes, maintaining TODO lists, planning projects, and authoring documents with a fast and effective plain-text system."

So, among other things, org-mode can be used for authoring documents, that is writing blogs, articles etc.

It has a wiki-like syntax that is lightweight but also complex (not-simple). Combined with the editing power of Emacs it becomes a powerful tool for writing blogs, articles and other docs. Then, it can be converted automatically to other formats, like HTML, LaTeX, PDF, etc.

I will try to describe how I use it for my needs (writing blogs, articles, etc.)

On Ubuntu it can be installed like this: sudo apt-get install emacs On other Linux systems it should be very easy too. If you are using Windows, then look at the instructions on this page.

The latest versions of Emacs include org-mode by default, so there is no need to do anything special for installing it. Just use the extension .org for the file and the org editing mode will be enabled automatically.

Emacs is an advanced editing tool and org-mode has lots of features, however not all of them are needed. For what we want to do (writing technical blogs and docs), we need some very basic and simple things.

I will list the ones that I use most frequently:

• Paragraphs are marked by empty lines:

  Paragraph1
  Paragraph1 continued
  
  Paragraph2
  Paragraph2 continued
  

• Headings are marked by stars at the beginning of a line:

  * Heading1
  ** Heading2
  *** Heading3
  ** Heading2
  
  * Heading1
  ** Heading2
  

• Ordered and unordered lists:

  + item-1
    1. item-1.1
    2. item-1.2
    3. item-1.3
  + item-2
    - item-2.1
    - item-2.2
    - item-2.3
  + item-3
  

  • item-1
    1. item-1.1
    2. item-1.2
    3. item-1.3
  • item-2
    • item-2.1
    • item-2.2
    • item-2.3
  • item-3
• Inline markup:

  *bold*, /italic/, _underlined_, =code= and ~verbatim~
  

  bold, italic, underlined, code and verbatim

• Hyperlink:

  [[http://info.btr.fs.al][B-Translator]]
  

  B-Translator

• Preformatted:

  #+BEGIN_EXAMPLE
  Some example from a text file.
  # +END_EXAMPLE
  

  Some example from a text file.
  

It is so simple, intuitive and familiar, that you don't even need a tutorial and can start using it right away.

You can find more about the markup that can be used, on the documentation of org-mode (or try info org on the terminal).

As an example, you can see the org code of this document itself on gist: easy-blogging-with-emacs.org

In order to publish the document, I do these steps:

1. First, convert it to HTML (with the emacs command: C-c C-e h).
2. Then open the generated HTML file in a browser.
3. And then copy/paste the content of the article from the browser to the editor of the blog site.

I don't know why, but a copy/paste like this usually works very well. I use Blogger for my blogs, but I think that it should work on other blog sites and WYSIWYG editors as well.

After the copy/paste, I still have to do some minor manual corrections, but this is much easier than writing the whole thing on the WYSIWYG editor.

Pay attention to these lines that are at the beginning of the org file:

#+OPTIONS: num:nil toc:t ^:nil f:nil TeX:nil LaTeX:nil
#+STYLE: <link href="css/org.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>

They control the look of the generated HTML file. The first one defines some settings/options, like: don't number headers, generate a TOC, turn off TeX syntax for subscripts, etc. More details and other options you can find on the documentation for export settings.

The second line tells it which CSS file to use, so that the generated HTML looks nice and beautiful. For a quick start, just download and use my org.css file, and later you can customise it for yourself. For example, it defines the style of preformatted text like this:

pre {
       padding: 10px;
       border: 1pt solid #AEBDCC;
       border-radius: 5px;
       background-color: #000000;
       color: #eeeeee;
       font-family: Ubuntu Mono, monospace, courier;
}

Org-mode can convert directly to PDF. However there is no way (as far as I know) to modify how the generated PDF file looks like. It always has the same standard look of an old scientific paper (I guess that the conversion to PDF is done by converting first to LaTeX).

I prefer to take another approach for generating PDF docs:

1. First I generate the HTML file (where I can control how it looks by customising the CSS file).
2. Then I copy/paste from the browser to LibreOffice (yes, this copy/paste works well too, preserving all the formatting and styles from HTML).
3. Finally save it as PDF. LibreOffice has a built-in PDF converter.

However, before the third step I do again some minor manual modifications. I also define styles for headings, preformatted text, text body, etc.

One of the things that I change in LibreOffice/PDF document is the style of the preformatted text. In the HTML version it is white font on a black background, and this is good because it looks like a terminal. However PDF documents sometimes can be printed and that style doesn't look nice on paper (and also it would consume lots of ink), so I change it to black font on white background.

To apply the new style on a preformatted text, I select it, then from the list of styles (on top-left) select "Clear formatting", then select the style "Preformatted Text". I have to do this for all the preformatted texts. I do the same thing for headings as well.

In order to not re-define the styles for each document, I open an old document, replace its content with the new content, and then save it with a new name. This will ensure that the styles of the new document are the same as the styles of the old one. Maybe LibreOffice has some other means for defining the styles and using them on each document, but I am not so familiar with LibreOffice and this trick works anyway.

If you want to use my styles, you can download the .odt document from here and use it as a template for your own docs.