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
