does org mode require a separate LaTeX installation to export?

does org mode require a separate LaTeX installation to export?

[Christopher W. Ryan]

Hello.  I'm giving a presentation about information management for large
distributed teams during a crisis, using org mode and git. It has been
decades since I have NOT had LaTeX on my machine, and it preceded emacs
for me, so I can't recall whether org mode needs LaTeX to export or not.

In other words, if a complete novice, knowing nothing about LaTeX and
not having it on their machine ever, installed emacs and created an org
mode file, could they export via latex to PDF?  Could they export to html?

Thanks.

--Chris Ryan

Re: does org mode require a separate LaTeX installation to export?

[William Denton]

On Wednesday, June 19th, 2024 at 08:55, Christopher W. Ryan <cryan@binghamton.edu> wrote:

> In other words, if a complete novice, knowing nothing about LaTeX and
> not having it on their machine ever, installed emacs and created an org
> mode file, could they export via latex to PDF? Could they export to html?

To HTML, yes.  They could export to a LaTeX file, but they wouldn't be able to do anything with it: to make the PDF they'd need the LaTeX environment, which Org relies on.  (Exporting to OpenDocument, .odt, works out of the box, so if they have LibreOffice or Word they could use that to convert to PDF, which might be more approachable, if that helps.)

Cheers,

Bill

--
William Denton
https://www.miskatonic.org/
Librarian, artist and licensed private investigator.
Toronto, Canada

Re: does org mode require a separate LaTeX installation to export?

[Christopher W. Ryan]

Thanks Bill!

William Denton wrote:
> On Wednesday, June 19th, 2024 at 08:55, Christopher W. Ryan <cryan@binghamton.edu> wrote:
> 
>> In other words, if a complete novice, knowing nothing about LaTeX and
>> not having it on their machine ever, installed emacs and created an org
>> mode file, could they export via latex to PDF? Could they export to html?
> 
> To HTML, yes.  They could export to a LaTeX file, but they wouldn't be able to do anything with it: to make the PDF they'd need the LaTeX environment, which Org relies on.  (Exporting to OpenDocument, .odt, works out of the box, so if they have LibreOffice or Word they could use that to convert to PDF, which might be more approachable, if that helps.)
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Bill
> 
> --
> William Denton
> https://www.miskatonic.org/
> Librarian, artist and licensed private investigator.
> Toronto, Canada
> 
> 

Re: does org mode require a separate LaTeX installation to export?

[Max Nikulin]

On 19/06/2024 19:55, Christopher W. Ryan wrote:
> In other words, if a complete novice, knowing nothing about LaTeX and
> not having it on their machine ever, installed emacs and created an org
> mode file, could they export via latex to PDF?  Could they export to html?

For HTML export, LaTeX may be required if you need math included as 
images, some MathML converters may need LaTeX as well. On the other hand 
MathJax relies on client JavaScript in browsers.

It is possible to convert HTML to PDF e.g. by printing it from a 
browser. Chrome/chromium have command line options to do it without 
starting GUI. Default CSS is likely not optimal for this workflow. 
Unless other factors are involved, I expect better quality of documents 
generated using LaTeX.