org: Exporting Agenda Views
10.7 Exporting Agenda Views
===========================
If you are away from your computer, it can be very useful to have a
printed version of some agenda views to carry around. Org mode can
export custom agenda views as plain text, HTML(1), Postscript, PDF(2),
and iCalendar files. If you want to do this only occasionally, use the
command
‘C-x C-w (org-agenda-write)’
Write the agenda view to a file. Depending on the extension of the
selected file name, the view will be exported as HTML (extension
‘.html’ or ‘.htm’), Postscript (extension ‘.ps’), iCalendar
(extension ‘.ics’), or plain text (any other extension). Use the
variable ‘org-agenda-exporter-settings’ to set options for
‘ps-print’ and for ‘htmlize’ to be used during export, for example
(setq org-agenda-exporter-settings
'((ps-number-of-columns 2)
(ps-landscape-mode t)
(org-agenda-add-entry-text-maxlines 5)
(htmlize-output-type 'css)))
If you need to export certain agenda views frequently, you can
associate any custom agenda command with a list of output file names
(3). Here is an example that first defines custom commands for the
agenda and the global TODO list, together with a number of files to
which to export them. Then we define two block agenda commands and
specify file names for them as well. File names can be relative to the
current working directory, or absolute.
(setq org-agenda-custom-commands
'(("X" agenda "" nil ("agenda.html" "agenda.ps"))
("Y" alltodo "" nil ("todo.html" "todo.txt" "todo.ps"))
("h" "Agenda and Home-related tasks"
((agenda "")
(tags-todo "home")
(tags "garden"))
nil
("~/views/home.html"))
("o" "Agenda and Office-related tasks"
((agenda)
(tags-todo "work")
(tags "office"))
nil
("~/views/office.ps" "~/calendars/office.ics"))))
The extension of the file name determines the type of export. If it
is ‘.html’, Org mode will use the ‘htmlize.el’ package to convert the
buffer to HTML and save it to this file name. If the extension is
‘.ps’, ‘ps-print-buffer-with-faces’ is used to produce Postscript
output. If the extension is ‘.ics’, iCalendar export is run export over
all files that were used to construct the agenda, and limit the export
to entries listed in the agenda. Any other extension produces a plain
ASCII file.
The export files are _not_ created when you use one of those commands
interactively because this might use too much overhead. Instead, there
is a special command to produce _all_ specified files in one step:
‘C-c a e (org-store-agenda-views)’
Export all agenda views that have export file names associated with
them.
You can use the options section of the custom agenda commands to also
set options for the export commands. For example:
(setq org-agenda-custom-commands
'(("X" agenda ""
((ps-number-of-columns 2)
(ps-landscape-mode t)
(org-agenda-prefix-format " [ ] ")
(org-agenda-with-colors nil)
(org-agenda-remove-tags t))
("theagenda.ps"))))
This command sets two options for the Postscript exporter, to make it
print in two columns in landscape format—the resulting page can be cut
in two and then used in a paper agenda. The remaining settings modify
the agenda prefix to omit category and scheduling information, and
instead include a checkbox to check off items. We also remove the tags
to make the lines compact, and we don’t want to use colors for the
black-and-white printer. Settings specified in
‘org-agenda-exporter-settings’ will also apply, but the settings in
‘org-agenda-custom-commands’ take precedence.
From the command line you may also use
emacs -eval (org-batch-store-agenda-views) -kill
or, if you need to modify some parameters(4)
emacs -eval '(org-batch-store-agenda-views \
org-agenda-span (quote month) \
org-agenda-start-day "2007-11-01" \
org-agenda-include-diary nil \
org-agenda-files (quote ("~/org/project.org")))' \
-kill
which will create the agenda views restricted to the file
‘~/org/project.org’, without diary entries and with a 30-day extent.
You can also extract agenda information in a way that allows further
processing by other programs. See 
Extracting agenda
information, for more information.
---------- Footnotes ----------
(1) You need to install Hrvoje Niksic’s ‘htmlize.el’.
(2) To create PDF output, the ghostscript ‘ps2pdf’ utility must be
installed on the system. Selecting a PDF file will also create the
postscript file.
(3) If you want to store standard views like the weekly agenda or the
global TODO list as well, you need to define custom commands for them in
order to be able to specify file names.
(4) Quoting depends on the system you use, please check the FAQ for
examples.
Info Catalog
org: Custom agenda views
org: Agenda Views
org: Agenda column view