Re: Org-Mode Presentation Videos

[srandby@gmail.com]

Sebastian Rose wrote:
> srandby@gmail.com wrote:
>> One comment. I've been using LaTeX for about 15 years, Emacs for about 
>> 2 years and Org-Mode for about 8 months. My LaTeX files are heavily 
>> customized and I'm used to working with them without org-mode. My few, 
>> and not very serious, attempts to move my LaTeX work to org-mode have 
>> not given satisfactory results, so I've put off changing my work flow 
>> until I have more time to figure out the LaTeX export features of 
>> org-mode. But, I am using org-mode extensively for my other work 
>> related tasks. I have org files that keep track of my students' grades 
>> and my web site is built from a single org file. As you pointed out in 
>> your talk, org-mode allows one to work!
> 
> There was a post on this list from Russel Adams, that shows how to use
> custom LaTeX headers. My setup is derived from that post, and enables
> the usage of a commen LaTeX-header for Org export and the rest of my
> LaTeX files:
> 
> .emacs:
> 
> (setq org-export-latex-classes (cons '("myarticle"
>      "% BEGIN My Article Defaults
> \\input{/home/sebastian/develop/lib/latex/header-pdf.tex}
> "
> 
>      ("\\rzchapteridx{%s}" . "\\rzchapteridx{%s}")
>      ("\\rzsection{%s}{}" . "\\rzsection{%s}")
>      ("\\rzsubsection{%s}" . "\\rzsubsection{%s}")
>      ("\\rzsubsubsection{%s}" . "\\rzsubsubsection{%s}"))
>      org-export-latex-classes))
> 
> As you can see here, I include the common header file, and customize
> the classes used for headlines on export. Since now the creation of
> PDFs is now possible directly from Org-mode (C-c C-e p), this is the
> easiest way to do it.
> 
> *.org:
> 
> #+LaTeX_CLASS: myarticle
> 

Thanks for this information. I still have a long way to go before I can 
use org-mode for LaTeX export.

First, I don't know emacs lisp. I've been planning to learn it, but 
finding the time is difficult and I'm not a professional programmer.

Second, the customizations I use for LaTeX vary widely between files. My 
understanding of your code, please correct me if I'm wrong, is that if I 
have multiple header files for different types of documents, then I must 
change my .emacs each time I want to change headers. This doesn't seem 
to be very convenient to me. I suppose it is possible to write some code 
to take care of multiple header files, but what if one has a brand new 
header file?

Please understand that I haven't really explored the LaTeX export 
features of org-mode very thoroughly. However, my impression is that the 
LaTeX export capabilities of org-mode are somewhat limited at this time. 
This isn't a bad thing. I don't think org-mode was designed to be a 
replacement for something like AUCTeX. Anyway, org-mode is works well 
for me for non-LaTeX tasks, so I'll continue to rely on it.

Scott Randby