Re: About exporting

["Thomas S. Dye" <tsd@tsdye.online>]

Aloha Ypo,

"Exporting for life" is a vague target, so it is difficult to give 
precise recommendations.

It is usually the case that export to LaTeX doesn't require 
subsequent modification of the tex file.  In most cases for my 
work, I am exporting to a LaTeX document style/class provided by 
someone else.  This is fairly typical of the LaTeX world, where 
academic journals and university degree programs design their own 
in-house styles and then ask authors to use them.  The idea behind 
LaTeX is that LaTeX defines the meaningful units of a document 
(headers, paragraphs, quotes, etc.) so that a single LaTeX 
document can be exported to multiple targets, each of which styles 
the document units in its own way.  Because Org mode targets 
LaTeX, and not a particular style, this means that Org mode 
inherits LaTeX's style agnosticism.

Of course, there are exceptions to this general rule, where a 
LaTeX class/style defines document units that extend the LaTeX 
spec.  It can be tricky to get Org mode to export to one of these 
non-standard styles.

If you intend to create documents with bibliographies, then IMHO 
LaTeX export is the best choice.  BibTeX defines a plain text 
bibliographic database that is very widely used and capable of 
meeting the most exact bibliographic requirements.  John Kitchin 
has written org-ref to manage BibTeX databases from Org mode, and 
Joost Kremers has ebib, which integrates nicely with Org mode and 
accomplishes many of the same tasks covered by org-ref.  A native 
Org mode bibliographic solution has been discussed for many years 
and there is an org-cite branch that is a nearly complete work in 
progress.  This will be designed to use Citation Style Language, 
rather than BibTeX, which means (at least currently IIUC) that 
there will be somewhat less fine control over bibliographic 
format, although there are thousands of CSL style definitions, 
which presumably cover all the most likely targets.  In my 
experience, CSL approximates most bibliographic styles, rather 
than producing them exactly, so YMMV.

Even without the need for bibliographies, LaTeX might be your best 
choice.  In my field, most of the journals *require* an MS Word 
document, a practice that gives me no end of heartburn.  I've 
found that export to LaTeX followed by conversion with the Haskell 
program pandoc gives the best results.  Pandoc is pretty nifty, 
with conversion among quite a few different formats.  LaTeX 
provides a rich input, which pandoc handles really well.

hth,
Tom


Ypo writes:

> Hi
>
> After some years of using orgmode, and exporting using its 
> defaults, I would
> like to take a quality leap and find a way of exporting for 
> life. My options:
> LaTeX, ODT, HTML.
>
> LaTeX: I can see some masters here that make professional books, 
> and I have some
> friends that publish scientific papers using LaTeX. But, it 
> looks like a like a
> rabbit hole to me, since even the masters seem to have to modify 
> the tex file
> directly (is this correct?), not being sufficient orgmode to 
> culminate the work
> by itself. And to learn LaTeX seems a lifelong activity (almost 
> like "learning"
> orgmode). BTW, when I export to LaTeX although it gets the job 
> done, it sends a
> lot of error messages.
>
> ODT: I take this one as a lower level solution than LaTeX, but 
> it looks easier
> to tame, and it even allows to use templates,  for example to 
> make reports in
> the workplace. Do you think it is worth focusing on ODT 
> exporting? Could it be a
> definitive solution to publish papers and books directly from 
> orgmode? ODT
> exporting sends some error message to me, but at least I 
> understand it.
>
> HTML: I have seen some themes
> <https://olmon.gitlab.io/org-themes/latexcss/latexcss.html> 
> designed to export
> in LaTeX format using HTML. Here we would have the "definitive 
> tool": The power
> of LaTeX in the versatility that could give the use of different 
> themes for
> different purposes. But, do you think it could get, some day, 
> the quality of a
> direct LaTeX export? No errors by my side when exporting to 
> HTML.
>
> How do you think I should spend some hundreds (or thousands) of 
> hours to achieve
> maestry exporting my documents?
>
> Best regards.


--
Thomas S. Dye
https://tsdye.online/tsdye