Exporting org to ascii without line breaks

Question

In org-mode (8.2.5) is there any way to export to ascii without line breaks being inserted at the end of every line in the .txt file?

A good canditate would have been:

(setq org-ascii-text-width nil)

But nil isn't accepted as an argument for org-ascii-text-width.

An un-elegant work-around is:

(setq org-ascii-text-width 1000)

Assuming that none of my paragraphs are more that 1000 characters long.

If I:

(setq org-ascii-text-width 10000)

I get the error:

Stack overflow in regexp matcher

Answer 1

This is somewhat embarrassing:

Removing the org-ascii-text-width-variable all together does what I need: no breaks are added when I export to ascii.

I started fiddling with org-ascii-text-width when I noticed line breaks being added in exported text and I wrongly assumed it was due to an update to org 8.2.5.

The cause of this was something else. I must have inadvertently set fill-column or something similar.

Answer 2

The misc-commands package defines a function called goto-longest-line. Using this function, we can define a function that sets org-ascii-text-width to the length of the longest line in the current buffer:

(defun org-set-ascii-text-width ()
  (save-excursion (setq org-ascii-text-width
                        (cadr (goto-longest-line (point-min) (point-max))))))

To make sure org-ascii-text-width gets updated every time you save an org-mode buffer, add it to before-save-hook:

(add-hook 'before-save-hook
          (lambda () (if (eq major-mode 'org-mode)
                         (org-set-ascii-text-width))))

---

misc-commands is available in MELPA and can be package-installed (after adding MELPA to the list of package archives for the Emacs Package Manager).

If you don't want to install the package I guess you could also head over here, grab the goto-longest-line function and add it to your .emacs (along with a comment that mentions the original author, of course).