When I was in primary school, I learned the recorder. The teacher librarian taught us, even though she did not have any musical training herself. We were then told that we would be performing at the Sydney Opera House together with a number of other schools. It was very exciting, and our little group worked hard to try and play together as an ensemble. As we got closer to the time, a specialist music teacher was brought in to try and get us in better shape. I learned so much from those couple of lessons, and we got to perform in the Opera House.

With my interest in languages, one YouTuber I like to follow is the “Rob Words” channel. He has posted a number of videos treating alternative ways of writing the English language. He talked about how runes might be better suited for writing modern English than the Latin alphabet we use today, and cited examples where J.R.R. Tolkein used the runic alphabet in his books to represent languages like Dwarvish from his Middle Earth fantasy world. One video that particularly stood out for me was his description of the George Bernard Shaw “Shavian” alphabet:

Earlier I talked about using Org Mode to produce lesson worksheets for my students. This year I am thinking about using powerpoint-style presentation slides instead of worksheets to encourage students to write more in their books. This naturally led me to look into how to do this with Org Mode.

A Simple Lesson

Making presentations in \(\LaTeX\) is normally done using the beamer package. It turns out that Org Mode has good support for beamer. An example of a simple lesson presentation org-mode file might look like this:

I’ve been using the Graphite keyboard layout on my ZSA Voyager keyboard for a few weeks now, and I’m fairly happy with it. I therefore decided to update the keymap of my Corne keyboard (which is for me is now a backup keyboard) from the Gallium keyboard layout to the Graphite layout.

As I mentioned previously , the punctuation symbols in a standard Graphite layout require the use of key overrides. By default, the Voyager web configuration tool doesn’t support key overrides, and so I implemented a solution using tap dance. For the Corne keyboard, I am using the Vial configuration tool which does support key overrides, and so I tried to set this up.

In my previous post on using Org mode to make lesson notes , I mentioned that it is possible to export Org mode tables to \(\LaTeX\). There are some benefits to using Org mode instead of raw \(\LaTeX\) when making tables:

• Org mode has a powerful table editor that makes it easy to draw out a table and move rows and columns around. Org mode will automatically make the all the columns line up nicely.
• Since the cells in an Org mode table are all nicely lined up, it makes the table much easier to visualise without having to count & symbols in raw \(\LaTeX\) code.
• Org mode allows the use of formulas in a table, somewhat like a spreadsheet – this is harder to achieve using \(\LaTeX\) directly.

The tables produced by Org mode are pretty basic by default. However, you can use the \(\LaTeX\) tabularray package to customise the look of your tables. Incidentally, if you are not already using the modern tabularray to produce your \(\LaTeX\) tables, you should definitely look into it – it is way more powerful and easy to use compared to the more traditional table packages (you can thank me later).

Over the past year, I have been using \(\LaTeX\) together with Emacs to produce lesson notes for some of my classes. One reason I went with Emacs instead of TeX Studio and the like was that Emacs provided a lot of shortcuts and completion features. I was finding though that \(\LaTeX\) documents can sometimes become a bit verbose, which made me wonder about ways to make it easier to navigate the documents.