Re: About exporting

[Martin Steffen <msteffen@ifi.uio.no>]

>>>>> "Eric" == Eric S Fraga <e.fraga@ucl.ac.uk> writes:

    Eric> On Tuesday, 30 Mar 2021 at 17:44, Juan Manuel Macías wrote:
    >> However, *I would not recommend anyone to use LaTeX for
    >> writing*. A light markup language is more comfortable and
    >> efficient for me.

    Eric> Totally agree!  Although, over the years, I have written many
    Eric> papers in LaTeX directly, in the past decade I have
    Eric> increasingly relied on org as the writing tool.  It imposes
    Eric> much less friction on the creative process and, as you say, it
    Eric> enables better management of the writing task.  And, as it
    Eric> gives direct access to LaTeX when necessary, you lose nothing
    Eric> by writing in org.

I would not go so far as not recommend latex (over org) for _anyone_ at
all. I for my part will stick with latex for a certain documents; for
others, org is better (has to do with the mentioned creative process,
and other advantages).


However, I write papers heavy in  math-notation (in the more theoretical
corners of conmputer science). There is a lot of math discplay (and I
like to rely heavily on macros etc).

For me, part of the preference of latex is the ratio between math and
similar things over ``text''. a blog-like text (not heavy on math), or a
note, or a wiki-like document etc, all that's great with org.

For math-typesetting, that's less of a ``creative flow of ideas
thing''. Of course, as having been mentioned, I can always escape to
latex inline or for displays etc. And I can also import my
macro-definitions etc (and I do that).

But actually, when typing, I think I am faster in latex. There are a
couple of features, I like (and my muscle-memory of my fingers rely in
them) in latex-modes of emacs.

Tab completion for environments and macros, remembering the last
environments I used, support of bibtex (like also completion or showing
the reference). Indentention of environments plus highlighting. And last
not least; if I ``compile'' the document (firing off latex, bibtex, or
index or whatever), the compilation runs in the background. As far as I
do that in org (exporting to pdf), it blocks emacs. Not that it's a
huge  delay even, at least for smaller documents, I hate that an editor
or some tool is slower than me, it gets on my nerves if the computer
slows me down. And there is a final thing which (for me) seem to work
better in latex-mode compared to org. That's jumping to the ``next
error'' with some key stroke. That's important,  LaTeX's own error
output it quite poor, but jumping to error locations is vital.


I would not be surprised if some of that is somehow supported by org as
well (for TeX), only I have not figured it out, or perhaps I was too
lazy to figure it out how. Too lazy because LateX mode works for me fine
even for challenging and long documents (where for simpler ones or where
the focus is not on typesetting org works).

Martin






    Eric> And *tables*!  Enough said. :-)

    Eric> But, as always, YMMV.

    Eric> -- : Eric S Fraga via Emacs 28.0.50, Org
    Eric> release_9.4.4-254-g37749c