As part of my Come Follow Me study for 2020 (which is focused on the Book of Mormon), I am converting the pdf of the handbook of Come Follow Me 2020 to orgmode text. I’ve decided to make this effort publicly available at gitlab, here.

What?

Orgmode is a program within the powerful Emacs text editor and files in Orgmode format are just text, so you can open them in notepad or any other text editor and they will be perfectly readable. Converting means making formatted things from the PDF, including tables, lists, chapters and sections, links, etc. For now I am not attempting to capture the images, but just noting where they are in the document. I format the text to be single-lines until paragraph/section breaks (so your viewer can display it however it wants, regardless of the PDF’s line- and page-breaking). “Smart quotes” are replaced with simple single or double quotes, and if any text is copied into strange characters (unlikely in this particular PDF), it will be made into the intended ascii characters.

Why?

The format is useful. If you use orgmode itself to view .org text files you gain many capabilities (updated video forthcoming) including collapsing, searching, linking, and time-utility functionality, including inserting into an orgmode calendar, if you like. You can also export them to a variety of formats from orgmode, including web pages, pdfs, or Word documents. It’s also much easier to copy-paste messages I want to share to friends or social media from the plain-text.

Besides this, the practice of converting it carefully is itself a way of studying. In the first chapter of the manual we are recommended to “Use this resource in any way that is helpful to you” and I hope it’s all the better if my method of creating, formatting, and sharing is helpful for anyone else, too.