I’m by no means an Emacs org-mode power user - in fact, anything but - but I do use org-mode a lot for note taking and also when I need an outliner to try and arrange ideas in a suitable manner. It excels at both, and usually does what I need including exporting to HTML. Exporting to HTML covers about 90% of my use cases. As much as I’d like to, LaTeX does not feature in my needs, but I needed to export an org-mode file for use with Microsoft Word. While there is no exporter directing into docx format, Microsoft Word can read ODT (OpenDocument Text) and guess what, org-mode does include an exporter for ODT. Problem solved, and I hope this information helps if you’re running into the same problem.

I have a few more loose ends to tidy up before switching to the static version of the blog. One of the important tasks was to make sure I had a spell checker available. Back in the dim and distant past I had set up flyspell-mode with hunspell, but I wanted to check if there was something better available these days. Enter enchant, which acts as a front end to multiple, different spell checkers. I like that Emacs has included support for enchant since version 26, plus one of the backends enchant supports is AppleSpell. In other words, when running on macOS, flyspell can make use of the OS’s built in spell checker and dictionaries.

Instructions on how to actually set up enchant on macOS are a bit thin on the ground, so I decided that I’ll put together a quick write up.