Hi all, I am a graduate student in philosophy, and I am about to begin writing my dissertation. I am wondering about whether I should write it in Org, or stick to plain LaTeX.
This question has been asked before: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.orgmode/22756 But that was two years ago; Org has changed a fair bit, and I'm wondering if there are any updates to the advice given there. Moreover, I'm wondering if anyone has written a dissertation or other long documents in Org in the meantime, and what their experiences have been. (Henri-Paul, do you still read this list?) I have used Org to write most of the shorter papers I have so far written as a graduate student, and been very happy with the results. I prefer most of Org's editing features and conventions to bare LaTeX. I haven't previously had much of a need to mix TODO items and writing, but imagine I will with a dissertation. I *have* been relying on Org's to-do list features for my reading: I enter new readings as TODO items via capture, and include the bibliographic fields that make them suitable to export via org-bibtex when it comes time to reference them. None of the writing I've done so far has had strict formatting requirements, however, and I have run into enough small formatting issues in the past that I want to avoid having them grow into large issues in the context of a dissertation. Since I am not in the sciences, I doubt that I will have many figures or complex tables, which I know can lead to headaches. Here are a few of the things I *am* worried about. I'm sure most of them can be dealt with; I am guessing that most of these issues reflect my ignorance or outdated knowledge of Org features. I'd be grateful for pointers or workarounds for them: 1) Section labels and other in-document references. It's nice that Org generates these on export, but I need to be able to assign and use labels that will not change if the document is reordered. I know I can simply add such labels via a \label command, but I am worried that using them in addition to Org's autogenerated labels might cause numbering problems in LaTeX. 2) Escaping/unrecognized commands. I have occassionally run into annoyances where Org escapes characters or commands that I intend to be exported literally ("~" and "$" are perennial offenders). Export also tends to break when fill-paragraph breaks a LaTeX command across a line, like: some preceding text up to the end of the line \cite{SomeAuthorReference, AnotherReference}. 3) Indentation around #+BEGIN_*/#+END_* environments. (I most often use QUOTE.) I usually have to explicitly control indentation in a way that I wouldn't have to in LaTeX, because Org inserts blank lines around them during export. 4) Inline footnotes. I usually prefer to use inline footnotes, but I think I have found in the past that Org's syntax for inline footnotes ([fn:: ...]) interacts badly with LaTeX commands, especially anything requiring a "]" in the footnote text. 5) Bibtex and bibliographies. I love keeping my reading list as Org TODO entries, but would like a more automated way to export (just) the entries I need for a particular document to a .bib file. I would also like to have more control over the bibliography as a section of my document. The \bibliography command must live under some Org heading or other, and as far I as know it can't live under its own without generating an extraneous heading, so I have to be careful that it ends up at the end of the last section. Are there other issues that people have run into when using Org to write a longer document with strict formatting requirements? Again, any and all advice is greatly appreciated! Thanks, Richard
