Show HN: An interactive kids' book written in Emacs Org Mode

4 points by dskhatri 364 days ago | 5 comments

I authored and developed an interactive fiction book in Emacs using Org mode and Twinery. Read an entire storyline/adventure of the Web Book, no login required here: https://tendollaradventure.com/sample/

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I authored and developed an interactive children's book about entrepreneurship and money management. The journey started with Twinery, the open-source tool for making interactive fiction, discovered right here on HN. The tool kindled memories of reading CYOA style books when I was a kid, and I thought the format would be awesome for writing a story my kids could follow along, incorporating play money to learn about transactions as they occurred in the story.

Twinery is a fantastic tool, and I used it to layout the story map. I really wanted to write the content of the story in Emacs and Org Mode however. Thankfully, Twinery provided the ability to write custom Story Formats that defined how a story was exported. I wrote a Story Format called Twiorg that would export the Twinery file to an Org file and then a Org export backend (ox-twee) to do the reverse. With these tools, I could go back and forth between Emacs and Twinery for authoring the story.

The project snowballed and I ended up with the book in digital and physical book formats. The Web Book is created using another Org export backend.

Ten Dollar Adventure: https://tendollaradventure.com

Sample the Web Book (one complete storyline/adventure): https://tendollaradventure.com/sample/

I developed another nifty feature that lets readers of the physical book access an online dashboard of achievements anonymously using secret "magic words" in lieu of requiring personal information. I couldn't muster the effort to write a special org export backend for the physical books unfortunately and used a commercial editor to format these.

Twiorg: https://github.com/danishec/twiorg

ox-twee: https://github.com/danishec/ox-twee

Previous HN post on writing the transaction logic using an LLM in Emacs: https://blog.tendollaradventure.com/automating-story-logic-w...

Twinery 2: https://twinery.org/ and discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32788965

idlip 359 days ago |

Hi dskhatri

Do you use reddit? If so please do post it in r/emacs and r/orgmode The community will be thrilled to know this feat. Really amazing work!

dskhatri 358 days ago | |

Thank you! I will attempt to share the technical details of the implementation there.

idlip 352 days ago | | |

Hey, just heads up reminding. Do try to post it on reddit. I will try to give link in mastodon.

mgd 364 days ago |

Org mode never ceases to amaze me. Great work, I'll see what my kids think of the book

dskhatri 364 days ago | |

I've been in love with Emacs and Org Mode for over a decade mostly as a user, only writing basic Elisp in my .emacs initialization file. Writing this book made me even more enamored with Emacs as I learned to write a few packages, and spent much time browsing the Org source code, especially around the export engine [1]. It was useful going through one.el source code as well [2]

[1] https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/master/lisp/org/o... [2] https://github.com/tonyaldon/one.el

And, thank you!