Re: About exporting

[Juan Manuel Macías]

Hi,

Ypo <ypuntot@gmail.com> writes:

> LaTeX: I can see some masters here that make professional books, and I
> have some friends that publish scientific papers using LaTeX. But, it
> looks like a like a rabbit hole to me, since even the masters seem to
> have to modify the tex file directly (is this correct?), not being
> sufficient orgmode to culminate the work by itself. And to learn LaTeX
> seems a lifelong activity (almost like "learning" orgmode). BTW, when
> I export to LaTeX although it gets the job done, it sends a lot of
> error messages.

I can tell you some points about my experience with the export to LaTeX,
since that's what I work the most with.

The advantages of using Org instead of "pure" LaTeX (as I already
discussed in another thread) are, IMHO, (a) being able to work on a much
lighter and human readable source (consider, for example, what a list
looks like in Org and what it looks like in LaTeX); and (b) be able to
export to various formats consistently from a single source. Therefore,
it would not be necessary to edit the *.tex document, as we would lose
the latter advantage.

Of course, if you want to use Org to create "refined" documents or books
with LaTeX, you're going to have to learn LaTeX. But "learning LaTeX" is
a imprecise term, since LaTeX has a minimal kernel concept expanded by a
(infinity of) macro packages. Even you can write your own packages, if
you know how to do it. That is, learning latex involves: a) learning
LaTeX syntax (which is not especially arduous) and b) learn the packages
you are going to use (and, therefore, *study its documentation*). The
documentation for each package is on CTAN (https://www.ctan.org/); you
also have, of course, lots of online documentation about LaTeX and TeX
in general. A very good place is https://tex.stackexchange.com/

My personal story has been to use LaTeX for years, until I decided to do
it from Org, but still using LaTeX ...

It also depends on the type of book/document you want to make. When
deals with very large books I usually create the preamble in a Org
document separately, and then I tangle the code in a tex file. And I
also use Org Publish to separate the parts of the book into small
documents (very useful).

Another great thing about Org, on the other hand, is that it has many
resources for control the export process. For example, in a book I'm
working on I noticed that the font has a kerning (separation
between characters) too close between the sign "(" and the italic "f",
producing a rather ugly effect. Simply, with a simple function in Elisp
I was able to readjust that space in the export process (see:
https://orgmode.org/manual/Advanced-Export-Configuration.html#Advanced-Export-Configuration)

All of this that I have discussed, of course, may sound too abstract.
But I can comment in more detail on more specific issues, if you have
any questions :-)

Best regards,

Juan Manuel