From: Richard Lawrence <richard.lawrence@berkeley.edu>
To: emacs-orgmode@gnu.org
Subject: Using Org for a dissertation
Date: Sat, 12 May 2012 11:23:10 -0700 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <87aa1dz2b5.fsf@berkeley.edu> (raw)
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outdated knowledge of Org features.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
next reply other threads:[~2012-05-12 18:23 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 27+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2012-05-12 18:23 Richard Lawrence [this message]
2012-05-12 16:49 ` Using Org for a dissertation Eric Schulte
2012-05-15 5:02 ` Richard Lawrence
2012-06-14 12:39 ` Rasmus
2012-06-14 16:13 ` Eric S Fraga
2012-05-12 19:27 ` Thomas S. Dye
2012-05-15 5:16 ` Richard Lawrence
2012-05-15 17:08 ` Nicolas Goaziou
2012-05-16 0:38 ` Richard Lawrence
2012-05-21 3:56 ` New exporter [was: Re: Using Org for a dissertation] François Pinard
2012-05-21 17:54 ` Nicolas Goaziou
2012-05-21 19:10 ` François Pinard
2012-05-23 0:35 ` François Pinard
2012-05-12 20:29 ` Using Org for a dissertation Peter Münster
2012-05-15 12:26 ` suvayu ali
2012-05-16 1:15 ` Richard Lawrence
2012-05-17 2:37 ` org-export-preprocess-hook and the new exporter (was Re: Using Org for a dissertation) Eric S Fraga
2012-05-18 6:49 ` Bastien
2012-05-18 10:08 ` Nicolas Goaziou
2012-05-20 6:12 ` Eric Fraga
2012-05-20 8:03 ` Nicolas Goaziou
2012-05-28 22:44 ` org-export-preprocess-hook and the new exporter Thomas S. Dye
2012-05-29 1:37 ` Eric S Fraga
2012-05-29 3:20 ` Thomas S. Dye
2012-05-21 13:21 ` Using Org for a dissertation Matt Lundin
-- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2012-05-15 16:44 Markus Grebenstein
2012-05-16 1:26 ` Richard Lawrence
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