Re: Professional PDF LaTeX templates?

[Eric S Fraga <e.fraga@ucl.ac.uk>]

'Mash <mashdot@toshine.net> writes:

> Quoting Eric S Fraga <e.fraga@ucl.ac.uk>:
>>
>>>> 2011/3/14 Thomas Herbert <mashdot@toshine.net>
>
>>>>>
>>>
>>>>> Afternoon,
>>>>>
>>>>> I wonder if anyone had any good examples of org-mode LaTeX templates with
>>>>> which to export professional looking PDFs?
>>>>>
>>>>> It is my big issue with org-mode at the moment, and I have tried reading
>>>>> what I can on LaTeX styling but it is getting to the point that I am
>>>>> spending way to much time trying to learn enough LaTeX only to
>>>>> find I can't
>>>>> translate it into anything that looks the quality of using MS
>>>>> Word and Adobe
>>>>> Flashpaper.
>>
>> Not intending to start a flame war but my experience is that latex, even
>> with everything at default settings, beats a typical MS Word document
>> hands down!  At least in academic circles, many publishers use latex for
>> the final typesetting stage even if the original article was submitted
>> in MS Word.
>>
>> The negative aspect, for some, about latex is that everything is
>> customisable (as you have alluded to) given that it is but a set of
>> macros built on top of the TeX typesetting system (thank you Donald
>> Knuth!).  Because the underlying system is both robust and
>> comprehensive, anything is possible!  The power of TeX comes partly from
>> the basis being both page and paragraph formatting, as opposed to line
>> by line formatting which tools like MS Word use.
>>
>> Therefore, I am curious as to what you wish to achieve:
>>
>> John Hendy <jw.hendy@gmail.com> writes:
>>> Instead... could you provide something you think is professional to
>>> set the bar and those on the list can either match it or point you in
>>> the direction of something they've seen or already created to fit into
>>> your genre of "professional"?
>>
>> This would indeed be very useful.
>
> Sorry yes my question was fairly vague. Also I actually had trouble
> trying to find an example of what I mean. But let me clarify.
>
> I suppose by "professional" I really meant "polished", and so it is
> LaTeX styling I have having trouble with, it may also be laziness on
> my part. I have tried searching for LaTeX styling which I can
> translate into a few org-mode header declarations but still can't work
> out what is or is not compatible with org-mode (LaTeX classes) or how
> to implement styling correctly.
>
> I think what it is that I have been using CSS for so long that I am
> getting frustrated in not being able to produce the level of results I
> want in LaTeX. Also I feel like a complete numpty not being able to
> clearly understand how to build and define external LaTeX classes I
> can call to output my simple .org file to a "polished" .pdf. I.e.
> margins, line-heights, different block element font styling, common
> graphical page headers or footers.
>
> There are a huge amount of LaTeX examples on the web, but they are
> full documents with inline elements, I wanted to know if anyone has
> already setup classes that work, with notes on LaTeX dependencies (and
> how and where to download them from) which they use day to day to
> produce reports, articles, contracts or client proposals from simple
> .org files?
>
> Is that any clearer?

A little but not really.  The trick with latex is not to define any new
classes (unless you really want something dramatically different than
already exists) but to customise existing classes through their options
and the use of supplementary packages.  Each document has a single class
(article, book, report, letter, ...) but can then load any number of
packages to add features.

The problem is we don't know what you are trying to write!  A book is
very different from a letter which is different from an article etc.  As
an example, if I were writing an article, I would base it on the
koma-script package [1] which allows customisation of headings etc.  To
customise the various things you mention above, I would then use the
=geometry=, =fancyhdr= and =graphicx= packages, to mention just a few.
All of these are well documented on CTAN [2] where you can search for
individual packages.  I would also directly modify some variables
(e.g. \parindent, \parskip) that are fundamental to the layout if need
be.

If you really want to learn how to customise latex, one of the best
resources is the Visual FAQ [3].

I hope this helps but do give more detail if you want explicit help.
However, if what you need is latex help, I suggest one of the tex
newsgroups [4] or some of the mailing lists (cf. gmane [5]) or
equivalent; if you want to know how to interface to latex from org, then
this list is indeed the place!

eric


Footnotes: 
[1]  http://mirror.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/koma-script/scrguien.pdf

[2]  http://ctan.org/

[3]  http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/info/visualFAQ/visualFAQ.pdf

[4]  e.g. comp.text.tex

[5]  http://gmane.org/

-- 
: Eric S Fraga (GnuPG: 0xC89193D8FFFCF67D) in Emacs 24.0.50.1
: using Org-mode version 7.5 (release_7.5.55.g87c42.dirty)