Re: [O] Professional PDF LaTeX templates?

[John Hendy]

On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 6:04 AM, 'Mash <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> Quoting Eric S Fraga <address@hidden>:
>>
>>>> 2011/3/14 Thomas Herbert <address@hidden>
>>>>>
>>>
>>>>> Afternoon,
>>>>>
>>>>> I wonder if anyone had any good examples of org-mode LaTeX templates
>>>>> with
>>>>> which to export professional looking PDFs?
>>>>>
>>>>> It is my big issue with org-mode at the moment, and I have tried
>>>>> reading
>>>>> what I can on LaTeX styling but it is getting to the point that I am
>>>>> spending way to much time trying to learn enough LaTeX only to find I
>>>>> can't
>>>>> translate it into anything that looks the quality of using MS Word and
>>>>> Adobe
>>>>> Flashpaper.
>>
>> Not intending to start a flame war but my experience is that latex, even
>> with everything at default settings, beats a typical MS Word document
>> hands down!  At least in academic circles, many publishers use latex for
>> the final typesetting stage even if the original article was submitted
>> in MS Word.
>>
>> The negative aspect, for some, about latex is that everything is
>> customisable (as you have alluded to) given that it is but a set of
>> macros built on top of the TeX typesetting system (thank you Donald
>> Knuth!).  Because the underlying system is both robust and
>> comprehensive, anything is possible!  The power of TeX comes partly from
>> the basis being both page and paragraph formatting, as opposed to line
>> by line formatting which tools like MS Word use.
>>
>> Therefore, I am curious as to what you wish to achieve:
>>
>> John Hendy <address@hidden> writes:
>>>
>>> Instead... could you provide something you think is professional to
>>> set the bar and those on the list can either match it or point you in
>>> the direction of something they've seen or already created to fit into
>>> your genre of "professional"?
>>
>> This would indeed be very useful.
>
> Sorry yes my question was fairly vague. Also I actually had trouble trying
> to find an example of what I mean. But let me clarify.
>
> I suppose by "professional" I really meant "polished", and so it is LaTeX
> styling I have having trouble with, it may also be laziness on my part. I
> have tried searching for LaTeX styling which I can translate into a few
> org-mode header declarations but still can't work out what is or is not
> compatible with org-mode (LaTeX classes) or how to implement styling
> correctly.
>

Still not positive on what you mean. Maybe find a document created by
*any* document-producing system that has what you want and then link
to it. I wouldn't limit it to LaTeX. From there, others can tell you
if (or more likely, how) it's possible to do the same with LaTeX.

> I think what it is that I have been using CSS for so long that I am getting
> frustrated in not being able to produce the level of results I want in
> LaTeX.

So do you have a css-based example of the level you're looking for?

> Also I feel like a complete numpty not being able to clearly
> understand how to build and define external LaTeX classes I can call to
> output my simple .org file to a "polished" .pdf. I.e. margins, line-heights,
> different block element font styling, common graphical page headers or
> footers.
>

I use the same header on all my work notes and pretty much everything
else and think it produces fine results. Nothing particularly fancy,
but just nice and clean and satisfying to me:
,-----
| I play with these as needed (changing to 'toc:t' if I want a toc, for example
| #+OPTIONS:   toc:nil *:t TeX:t LaTeX:t H:5 tags:nil todo:nil <:nil
|
| wider margins; about the only thing that really irks me about the
default output
| #+LATEX_HEADER: \usepackage[hmargin=2.5cm,vmargin=2.5cm]{geometry}
|
| better font, in my opinion. I use minion/myriad a decent amount as well
| #+LATEX_HEADER: \usepackage{mathpazo} \usepackage{paralist}
|
| I like blue better than red... so I changed link colors
| #+LATEX_HEADER: \hypersetup{colorlinks=true,linkcolor=blue,urlcolor=blue}
|
| I'm often exporting just work notes so I don't need some title at the top
| #+BIND: org-export-latex-title-command ""
`-----

> There are a huge amount of LaTeX examples on the web, but they are full
> documents with inline elements, I wanted to know if anyone has already setup
> classes that work, with notes on LaTeX dependencies (and how and where to
> download them from) which they use day to day to produce reports, articles,
> contracts or client proposals from simple .org files?
>

Well, not really "pretty" or whatever, but this is the example I was
going to provide before:

https://sites.google.com/site/jwhendytank/home/FHTM_Analysis_Aug-2010.pdf

A friend pitched me something called a multi-level marketing scheme.
He was incredibly excited about it and was planning to recruit about
everyone he knew. The more I looked into it, the more I saw how
divisive the topic was. People either loved it or hated it and argued
for their stance based on intuition and affiliation. So... I went
about writing a mathematical analysis of how it works over the course
of about 6mos. I think I showed pretty clearly that it's solely about
being at the top of a pyramid (if you can ever get there) and making
loads of money from the thousands of peons below you.

No offense if anyone on the mailing list has ties to something like
this. I state my conclusion only because I've actually looked into the
math of this entity and it shows that you can only make money if there
are exponentially more below you doing the actual work... and I see
that as unethical.

Anyway, there's one example -- written entirely in org-mode, exported
with approximately the settings you see above. That's that.


John

> Is that any clearer?
>
>
>