Re: Org as a publishing toolkit

[Mike McLean <mike.mclean@pobox.com>]

On 5/10/11 1:52 PM, Marcelo de Moraes Serpa wrote:
> Hi list,
>
> So today I have been reseaching about higher-levels toolkits that
> could help me get into TeX (and or LaTeX) and at the same time
> allowing me to keep the text in a more human-readable format (easier
> to mantain and to convert to other formats if needed).
>
> I know that if I want beautiful formatted PDFs I will need to get into
> TeX / LaTeX, and I already started doing that, but as I said, keeping
> the text in a higher level format has benefits that you already know
> about.
>
> So I looked at asciidoc, the lower-level XML-based docbook, markdown,
> pandoc, ConTeXt, etc.
>
> Then I thought, why not try orgmode?

I've done the same thing over the past few months and agree that
org-mode as the front end for a LaTeX document production system is the
way to go. The low-level tweak that I've added is a definition of a set
of LaTeX custom classes that map to my "roles" in life. For example, I
am the president of a non-profit organization and I have a LaTeX class
for that organization. This class defines chapter heads, title pages,
etc. to have a look-and-feel of the organization. I have a day job, the
LaTeX class for that reflects the corporate communication guidelines.
(And so on).

I had tried the route of defining various low-level LaTeX tweaks in
header statement in org export option files, and this was wayyyyy to
complex, fragile, and very difficult to maintain. The time I spent the
last few weeks creating 3 (of 4) necessary LaTeX =.cls= files has so far
been time well spent. I would strongly recommend thinking about putting
any desired low-level LaTeX tweaks into a class (or set of classes) that
are *your's*.