Update 2013-08-30: By the way, here’s the link to Christopher Olah’s first post using org2blog. Neato!

The LaTeX logo, typeset with LaTeX (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Org2Blog is an awesome geek-friendly way of writing posts and publishing them to a WordPress-based blog. When Christopher Olah told me that he’d gotten convinced to try Org Mode thanks to the enthusiastic recommendations from Michael Nielsen and me, we figured that getting him sorted out with taking notes in Org and publishing them through Org2Blog to his WordPress.com-hosted blog would be an excellent way to start – especially with inline images and LaTeX.

Chris has promised to write a blog post about what he’s learned, but he’ll probably find these notes useful. Here’s what we ran into when getting org2blog working on Ubuntu.

Need to install the files and set up the load paths

We downloaded the following and added them to an ~/.elisp directory

• https://github.com/punchagan/org2blog
• https://github.com/punchagan/metaweblog.el
• https://launchpad.net/xml-rpc-el

We also set up his ~/.init.d/emacs.el to load the libraries, set the blog list, and load ido-mode and icomplete-mode.

Emacs / Org too old

Metaweblog and Org2blog didn’t work well with Emacs 23 and Org 6. We upgraded to Emacs 24 with apt-get install emacs24 in order to get Org 7.

Can’t find library org

It turns out that you also need to apt-get install emacs24-el in order to include those libraries.

Org still too old for org2blog

We were having some problems with the version detection of org2blog, so we replaced the org2blog he downloaded with the version I forked at https://github.com/sachac/org2blog , which I’ve been using with Org 7.

Then we tested it with org2blog/wp-post-subtree, and that worked. Inline images with org-toggle-inline-images worked too, yay!

Next step: viewing LaTeX fragments, since Chris does a lot of math.

dvipng required

org-preview-latex-fragment wanted dvipng to be installed, so we apt-get install dvipng.

LaTeX fragment preview showed blank images

We looked at the *Messages* buffer and found that the .tex files in /tmp could not be rendered by dvipng because marvosym.sty could not be found. We fixed that with apt-get install texlive-fonts-recommended.

(Doing this on my own, I found that I also needed apt-get install texlive-latex-extra .)

… and then we could see and publish LaTeX fragments, which was awesome. =D

WordPress.com double-interpreted LaTeX fragments

Chris was having problems with LaTeX fragments when org-export-with-LaTeX-fragments was set to dvipng. It turns out that WordPress.com also interprets LaTeX, so it was getting confused by the alt tags. To solve this, use M-x customize org-export-with-LaTeX-fragmentsand choose Leave math verbatim. Then the LaTeX fragments are passed to WordPress, which renders them as PNGs.