Re: ox-tufte-latex

[Thomas S. Dye <tsd@tsdye.com>]

Aloha Rasmus,

You've got it exactly right.  I read through ox-latex.el, found the
functions I wanted to change, copied them to ox-tufte-latex.el and added
a few lines of code here and there (using babel and noweb chunks).

It would indeed be easy to modify ox-latex.el so it supports the
non-standard commands of the Tufte LaTeX package.  I can send patches to
that effect, if you like.  Ox-latex would need to recognize a few new
LaTeX attributes and export marginfigure, marginnote, and sidenote
commands.  I hijacked footnote for sidenote, so this would probably need
some work to recognize when one or the other was needed.

The reason I originally decided not to suggest patches to ox-latex.el
is that the Tufte LaTeX package is a bit cranky and I was unsure of its
future. I thought it might be better to leave ox-latex to the more
stable and mature LaTeX packages.  I hadn't thought about backporting,
etc.

hth,
Tom


Rasmus <rasmus@gmx.us> writes:

> Mojn Tom,
>
> I'm pretty invested in KOMA-Script but this is a great as a lot of 
> people really appreciate the Tufte package.
>
> Thomas S. Dye <tsd@tsdye.com> writes:
>
>> I've cobbled together an exporter for the Tufte LaTeX classes, 
>> which I'd like to contribute to Org mode contrib/.
>
> My initial beef with your code it that it seems, from skimming the 
> code, to replicate a lot of functions from ox-latex.  This means 
> that when ox-latex.el updates, we might have to backport the 
> changes into ox-tufte-latex.  It’s already some work keeping 
> ox-beamer and ox-latex up to date (e.g. I added a some feature to 
> ox-latex and only realized much later that I hadn’t added it to 
> ox-beamer).
>
> E.g. org-tufte-latex--inline-image is very much alike 
> org-latex--inline-image.
>
> I don’t know to what extend it would be possible to minimize 
> replication.  Perhaps you already did this and perhaps my comments 
> are merely following from the fact that I did not study your patch 
> appropriately (I’m traveling ATM).
>
> Another question is, what features would we need to make more 
> flexible in ox-latex in order to obsolete your class or reduce it 
> to an element in org-latex-classes?  Is there some areas where 
> it’s lacking for the purpose of "tufing" ox-latex output?
>
> In any I’m very happy that you are working on this.  I hope the 
> above is not discouraging; that’s at least not what it’s meant to 
> be.
>
> Thanks,
> Rasmus


-- 
Thomas S. Dye
http://www.tsdye.com