In this series of introductory posts on org-mode we have been focussing on simple text-based notes. We looked at structuring your notes and adding tables to your notes. Next we will look at adding links and images. Links can be to files, URLs or locations in the current org document. If the link is to an image then emacs can display it inline in the org document. This is handy for enhancing your notes and will also be useful when we come to look at exporting to different formats.
As before I suggest adding the notes below to your growing org file. Note that below I have formatted the notes as plain text because org-mode changes the appearance of links, such as hiding the [] around links, which is nice in your org-mode document but makes it harder for me to show you what is going on!
* Links and images Org mode supports links to files, URLs, and to other points in the org file. In this example let's use an image from my website. First copy it to the current directory. You can do this within emacs but for now just run this command in your terminal. curl http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/bjm/superman_cluster.gif -o superman_cluster.gif To add a link to a file use C-u C-c C-l and type the name of a file. Use tab-completion to select the image we just copied and you will then be asked for a description - you can press enter to leave this blank. This will create a link that looks like this [[file:superman_cluster.gif]] If you do this in your org file, you wont see the [[ ]] above, instead you'll see the text as a clickable link. Since the file we have linked to is an image, we can tell emacs to the image in the document using C-c C-x C-v and use the same command to turn the image off again. You can also click the link with the mouse, or use C-c C-o to follow it, which might open your web browser, an image viewer or open a file in emacs depending on the target of the link. The structure of a link in org mode looks like this #+BEGIN_EXAMPLE [[link address][description]] #+END_EXAMPLE (I've enclosed the link in an example block which prevents org-mode from trying to interpret as a real link, for the purpose of showing its structure - we'll come back to blocks like this later.) The link address is the URL or file name, and the description is the text that is displayed, so we can replace our superman link with something tidier like [[file:superman_cluster.gif][this]]. Links to web pages are easy - just put the http address in as the link address. Use C-c C-l as a quick way to add such a link (remember we used C-u C-c C-l is for adding a link to a file). Links to other parts of the org file are added easily like [[Links and images][this link]]. Because the address part of the link matches a headline in this document, then org-mode points the link to that part of the file. Clicking it will move the cursor there. Finally, we can add a caption and a name to our image like this #+CAPTION: Superman and a galaxy cluster #+NAME: fig.super [[file:superman_cluster.gif]] which means we can refer to our image later with a link like this one [[fig.super]]
That’s all for now. Next time I think we’ll look at some simple text formatting.