L. Strope

entropy in action

Tips for blogging with org-mode and EGO

There were a few things that annoyed me with org-mode. I considered one of them a deal-killer: all org-mode emphasis characters were exported too.

These characters wrapped all text that had emphasis, like bold, underline, italics, code, strike-through. Each of these still has annoying spacing, but the special characters are gone!

Before I found a solution I tried everything I could think of; pouring over org-mode manuals and even cracking open the source-code of EGO. No matter what I tried the offending characters would still export to HTML.

This exercise was not completely fruitless, as I stumpled upon a way to remove them when I realized how emacs and org-mode itself hides the characters.

Pro Tip: Modify the CSS to hide the offending characters.

For instance, to remove leading stars:

b:before, b:after, strong:before, strong:after {
                                    content: "*";
                                    color: var(--body-color);

In the example I am setting the color to be the same as the body color.

At first I thought this was a smelly hack but I arrived at this solution after turning them off in emacs, which uses this same technique. I did not think this was clever because the emphasis-characters are still there, but they are not visible so my problem is solved.