On 2014-11-28, at 18:40, Richard Lawrence wrote: > Hi Jake, > > Others have already given you good advice, but since I am also writing > my thesis in Org, I thought I would chime in. Like you, I felt a bit of > trepidation when I was deciding whether to write in Org or LaTeX; I > ultimately went with Org because (1) I find it much more pleasant to use > 98% of the time; (2) I felt pretty confident I could plug the gaps in > the other 2% with help from Org's awesome community; and (3) I wanted > the option to export to other formats like HTML (though I haven't used > this much so far).
Re (1): as I said, I'm biased; re (2): thanks for making me realize this was exactly one of my reasons to stay with LaTeX. >> My first concern is losing the ability to use internal links if I use >> separate files. Another thought is compilation time if I use one file and >> must always run pdflatex over the entire document. I'm sure there are >> pitfalls either way that I'm not yet aware of. > > If you decide you need to go the multiple-files route, you can probably > find a way to convert internal links into external ones. I half-recall > someone posting code on this list to do this at some point... Yep, it was me. https://github.com/mbork/org-one-to-many, please consider it somewhere between proof-of-concept and public beta (bug reports/feature requests welcome). > Here are a couple of other things to think about. When I decided to go > with Org, I took a few steps to ensure that if I ever need to switch to > pure LaTeX, I will be able to do so with minimal pain, just by exporting > my Org document to .tex and going from there. (The big sticking point > here for me was making sure I could produce human-readable, stable > labels and refs for things like sections. See the variable > org-latex-custom-id-as-label, which was introduced by a patch I wrote.) Nice! > If you're worried about ever having to make the switch, I would > recommend thinking ahead about each of the Org features you rely on and > seeing how they get exported to LaTeX. If the default output is not > something you'd want to edit by hand, consider either limiting your use > of that feature, or customizing it so that it produces better output for > you. Org provides a lot of ways to do the latter, from tweaking > variables to export filters to custom export backends. Great advice! Again, a project idea I mentioned some time ago (a LaTeX exporter which would export to something more idiomatic and customizable on the LaTeX side) might help here. Not yet, however, I don't have time for that now. > Hope that's helpful! > > Best, > Richard Regards, -- Marcin Borkowski http://octd.wmi.amu.edu.pl/en/Marcin_Borkowski Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science Adam Mickiewicz University
