Make Org export work with silos

The Org export infrastructure is designed to ignore directory-local variables. This means that Denote silos, which depend on setting the local value of the variable denote-directory, do not work as intended (Maintain separate directory silos for notes). More specifically, the Denote links do not resolve to the right file, because their path is changed during the export process.

I brought this to the attention of the Org maintainer. The guidance from their side is to use the ‘#+bind’ keyword to specify a local value for the denote-directory: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-orgmode/2024-06/msg00206.html. The prerequisite is to set org-export-allow-bind-keywords to a non-nil value:

(setq org-export-allow-bind-keywords t)

I do not think this is an elegant solution, but here are two possible ways to go about it, anyway:

1. Manually add the ‘#+bind’ keyword to each file you want to export. It has to be like this:

   #+bind: denote-directory "/path/to/silo/"

2. Alternatively, you can make the Org front matter that Denote uses for new files automatically include the ‘#+bind’ keyword with its desired value. Here is a complete ‘.dir-locals.el’ which (i) defines the silo and (ii) modifies the denote-org-front-matter accordingly:

      ;;; Directory Local Variables.  For more information evaluate:
      ;;;
      ;;;     (info "(emacs) Directory Variables")
   
      ((nil . ((denote-directory . "/path/to/silo/")
               (denote-org-front-matter .
                "#+title:      %s
   #+date:       %s
   #+filetags:   %s
   #+identifier: %s
   #+bind:       denote-directory \"/path/to/silo/\"
   \n"))))

   [ Note that if you are reading the Org source of this manual, you need to use the command org-edit-special on the above code blocks before copying the code. This is because Org automatically prepends a comma to disambiguate those entries from actual keywords of the current file. ]