emacs-orgmode@gnu.org archives
 help / color / mirror / code / Atom feed
* Example of thesis in org-mode and LaTeX
@ 2007-12-04  2:14 Daniel Clemente
  2007-12-04  3:42 ` Rustom Mody
                   ` (2 more replies)
  0 siblings, 3 replies; 13+ messages in thread
From: Daniel Clemente @ 2007-12-04  2:14 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: emacs-orgmode

Hi,

* intro  ;(warning: orgstruct-powered e-mail...)

  I recently published my final thesis, written entirely with org-mode:

- description of the thesis: http://www.danielclemente.com/disk/disk.en.html
- direct link to PDF: http://www.danielclemente.com/disk/disk.de.pdf
- source file:  http://www.danielclemente.com/disk/disk.de.org

  I started writing it in LyX but after some months I changed to
org-mode. It was a risky change since org-export-as-latex was still in
development, but thanks to Bastien all bugs were quickly fixed.

  It's not a complex document (no images, no formulas) but has lists,
footnotes, bibliography (references) and other embedded LaTeX
(including the preamble in a local variable). I haven't tried yet
exporting it as HTML.


** experiences

  The change was really worth it:

*** integration
  I could do everything inside emacs. That means, even without mouse,
using my favourite key combinations. And with an integrated browser
where I could look up words in the dictionary.

*** outline
  The outlining function of org-mode was the most useful. It's
wonderful seeing 60 pages condensed in one and at the same time being
able to change each detail without much trouble.

  A problem was that each header doesn't give information about how
much text it contains: at the outline you can see „Point 1" and „Point
2", but you don't notice that for instance that „Point 1" contains
just half page and „Point 2" four pages; and that was important for me
since I had to control the number of pages per section.

*** tasks
  I could also track tasks. Each section started as some notes in
Spanish, then I would translate it to German, and finally ask some
German native speaker to revise the text. Each item went through
„write"->„translate"->„correct"->„done".

  To track translations and corrections I used an additional section
and normal lists. I didn't use properties at each trackable section
because that was slower than copying the overview to a piece of paper
and drawing possible distributions of the work there. This was because
the assignments were complex to describe: ex. a person was correcting
point 3 --except 3.2-- and point 4; another one was correcting 3.1,
3.3, 3.4 and 5 but just after point 3.3 is completely translated; etc.
And I wanted to distribute work evenly; therefore I needed to write at
each section how many pages it took. And this was easier with a „piece
of paper", especially it didn't require much time to optimize.

  If I had to do this again, I would invest more time on learning
„org-columns", since it provides a similar approach to what I did in
the paper: for each section there's a column „person assigned for
translation" and „person assigned for revision".


** Problems

  Problems I had with org-mode:

- bugs or missing features of org-export-latex: but all which I
reported where corrected by Bastien
- the syntax of org-mode hindered me from doing what I wanted:
 - I couldn't write *1* *2* *3* etc.
 - it took a lot of hacks to write a number in brackets: [1]
 - things „like *this*" didn't work out of the box (and reached
unnoticed the final version)
 - the processing of some characters wasn't very clear: ~ # \ $ etc.
gave export problems

  Many of these syntax problems were already corrected


** end

  I hope that this encourages others to write more long articles with
org-mode. It's possible and very comfortable; and the more work there
is, the more it helps!


  Thanks for org-mode,

Daniel

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 13+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2007-12-09  9:40 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 13+ messages (download: mbox.gz follow: Atom feed
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2007-12-04  2:14 Example of thesis in org-mode and LaTeX Daniel Clemente
2007-12-04  3:42 ` Rustom Mody
2007-12-04  4:02   ` Daniel Clemente
2007-12-04 11:20   ` Bastien
2007-12-05 11:53     ` ignotus
2007-12-05 13:00       ` Bastien
2007-12-05 13:18         ` Rustom Mody
2007-12-05 21:19           ` Mike Newman
2007-12-06 12:26           ` Daniel Clemente
2007-12-09  0:25             ` Bastien
     [not found]       ` <acf852aa0712050613lf21c99exe8fd3f3d1a9b97cf@mail.gmail.com>
2007-12-05 14:14         ` Fwd: " Carsten Dominik
2007-12-04 11:29 ` Bastien
2007-12-09  9:33 ` Gour

Code repositories for project(s) associated with this public inbox

	https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs/org-mode.git

This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for read-only IMAP folder(s) and NNTP newsgroup(s).