Re: First steps exporting to tex

[Juan Manuel Macías]

William Denton writes:

> [...] and it looks like a published book or journal article!

Something similar I thought, in my student days, when at the early '90 I
saw a document printed in word perfect, just because it had a book
typeface (Times Roman), footnotes and many more fancy stuff. It looked
/almost/ like a book.

With LaTeX something similar happens for the user who is not trained in
professional typesetting. TeX as a typographic engine makes an excellent
work at the 'physical' level, but as we say in Spain, the trees do
not let us see the forest. A LaTeX document produced from standard way
will need (likely) a lot of fine tuning, and a solid typographic culture
acquired by those who check it out.

On the other hand, I think that if an Org user is going to export often
to LaTeX, he should know LaTeX reasonably well. I do not say that he
become a LaTeXpert, but at least the user should have clear which
concepts are from Org and which concepts are from LaTeX. The LaTeX
packages you may need as you want to do more complex things, and how to
use those packages. Etc. On the Org side there are many and excellent
resources to control the export process. But in any translation process
you have to know the source language (Org) and what can be expressed in
the final language (LaTeX) and how. And the the same happens if the
output is HTML, Epub or whatever. I think Org is an excellent tool, full
of possibilities (maybe a lot of them don't explored yet) and wonderful
things, but it is not magic, although its logo is an unicorn ;-)

Best regards,

Juan Manuel