[emacs-wiki-discuss] Re: planner.el questions, suggestion for planner.pdf

[Maciej Kalisiak]

On Thu, Jul 08, 2004 at 06:51:00PM +0800, Sacha Chua wrote:
> Maciej Kalisiak <address@hidden> writes:
> > The #1 thing that is a thorn in my side right now is, is it possible
> > to specify tasks more verbosely somehow? For example, I might want
> > to create a task "build foo", and at the same time I might have a
> > brief idea on how to perform this task, and so I would like to
> > somehow attach this info to the task, perhaps as an explanatory
> > paragraph. The one-line task specs seem very limiting in this
> > regard. I'm not sure whether one is supposed to specify tasks with
> > multiple lines in such cases, or whether notes should be used, or
> > what. I had the idea of perhaps using "remember" on the task line in
> > question, but the note so generated (I'm using planner-remember.el)
> > does not have any context/link information.
> 
> Planner task numbers change too much for planner to keep useful
> annotations, although I suppose copying the entire task description or
> using task IDs for this purpose would help.
> 
> The reverse works reliably, though. You can create a note first, then
> position point on the note headline and use M-x
> planner-create-task-from-buffer to create a task.

Ahhhh!  So the workflow becomes: have an idea, scribble it down and possibly
brainstorm, list any hints or rough task breakdown you see, all in a note or
two, and then use that as the starting point for planning and creating tasks.
Kind of different from my previous workflow (mostly emacs-wiki + allout
outline giving a highly annotated and hierarchical todo tree; not very pretty,
but sort of functional).  I think I can work with this, cool.  I'll experiment
and tailor further.

> If you find yourself adding a lot of detail, you can create a separate
> plan page for your notes and then link to the plan page using
> WikiWords or [[ExplicitLinks]]. You can do this before you create the
> task or after you do it. =)

Right... oh, wanted to confirm, plain ol' Wiki pages under ~/Plan do not
interfere in any way with the linked system of daily and project pages, right?

> > A close second is the following question. Up until now, I've been
> > using "records" package under emacs to keep various records/logs
> > (research log, sysadmin log, journal, etc). I've got fed up with its
> > quirks and annoyances, and I don't see the situation changing
> > anytime soon, so I'm looking for a replacement, and this in part led
> > me to notice planner.el. My question is, as a competent and fluent
> > "planner/remember/etc" user, what do you see would be the most
> > sensible way of implementing an equivalent system with the
> > planner/etc tool set combo? Again, the picture of these tools is not
> > completely clear to me, so I figured I'd ask a guru. :) Essentially
> > I'm looking for a system of dated text segments with hyperlinks.
> 
> I used records before, and it was rather nice. I wanted more freedom
> for my notes, though. When I found johnw's planner.el, I liked it so
> much I volunteered to maintain it, and here I am! =) What did you
> particularly like and dislike about records? I love picking up cool
> ideas from other personal information managers.

Well, here goes a rough list of the things that come to mind at the moment:

* I liked the (similar to planner) dual nature of the entries, in that they
  could be presented as entries of a particular day, or of a particular
  subject

* I liked the searching ability within topics

* what drove me nuts were the little things, but nonetheless things that got
  in the way on a daily basis, making the package "broken/buggy" for my
  purposes, and I just didn't have the time, energy or elisp hackery to fix it
  myself; stuff like
  - in order to do anything (searches, concatenate previous records for given
    subject, etc) within records had to start in a records buffer,
    which often meant I had to first create a blank record for today,
    something I frequently didn't want to do
  - the reindexing was a bit of a pain as I kept the records tree synchronized
    between my laptop and main machine using CVS (had to do cvs up;
    records-admin; in Emacs C-c C-z on both machines to assure sync)
  - for some reason I never got comfortable navigating within records; I think
    it lacked a good overview of the whole database, and of just the
    topics... records did have the index page, but due to the ugly to parse
    links to pages it was not very useful; much better would have been
    overview generated pages which would list the first line of each entry
    with the link

Now, there has been work on records AFAIK, and a version 2 is pending, but
it's been pending for an aweful long time, and it seems it's starting to veer
towards becoming a weblog tool (rather than general record/log keeping), so
I'm jumping ship.

> If you want dated text segments with hyperlinks, check out
> remember-planner.el . The comments describe exactly how to set it up.
> You can then use M-x remember to pop up a buffer for remembered notes,
> which will be placed on your daily page and optionally
> cross-referenced with a plan page.

I do have it setup already.  Ah, so the note ALWAYS goes on the daily page,
and only optionally for the project page, I see.  From what I understand, the
note text is duplicated across both pages, right?  Hmm, this might be a bit
too much duplication for my purposes.

Oh!  I've forgot to ask: what is the proper way to update the text of a note,
so that the pages propagate to the other linked (daily or project) page?!

> > BTW, I was checking out the various documentation files for planner
> > before starting, and I ran across the PDF version, which just looks
> > painful. It appears that it was first built as a PostScript file,
> 
> Excellent point. I've changed it to use pdftex. Thanks for pointing
> pdftex out! I didn't actually know about it before.
> 
> Are the docs at
> http://sacha.free.net.ph/notebook/doc/dev/planner/planner.pdf more
> acceptable?
> 
> > then converted to PDF using suboptimal settings (the hideous uneven
> > and blurry font suggests PS file was generated using the dreaded
> 
> It seems still uneven, though...

Yes, the hyperlinking is there now, but for some reason it still keeps using
Type 3 fonts (IIRC these are bitmap fonts, hence the ugliness; this can be
looked up in the acrobat reader under File->Doc Props->Fonts; the scalable
fonts are Type 1).  I'm guessing it's the LaTeX/pdfTeX package font setup
somehow on the generating machine, but it's hard to tell where exactly the
problem is.  Are you using Debian perhaps? (I might be able to help you
further then)  Or else I'd be willing to generate the required PDFs for you,
if you'd like.

-- 
"Veni, Vidi, Visa."