Re: About exporting

[Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com>]

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

> On Wednesday, 31 Mar 2021 at 20:28, Martin Steffen wrote:
>> 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.
>
> Yes, this is an issue I have as well.  And the fact that the error
> messages are for the LaTeX lines, not the org lines, so you end up
> sometimes having to look at the LaTeX code and then go back to the org
> file.  This definitely adds friction!
>
>> 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. 
>
> No, I don't think there's anything (at the moment) to help with this.  I
> would love to be proven wrong, mind you!  Org always has more
> capabilities than I know...

the only small bit of help I've found is org-lint, which has helped me
find issues in the past. Doesn't help track down errors from *.tex ->
pdf etc, but often an error in the org file causes the errors in the
*.tex export.

Having said that, I find the most common cause of errors in the *.tex
export is due to in-line Latex in my org file. I rarely run into errors
due to export of 'normal' org content.

When I do run into problems, I just open the *.tex file in Auctex mode
and track it down that way. Usually, it isn't too hard to work out where
that relates back to the source org file. Being able to do that
semi-automatically would be nice, but I think something that would be
very difficult to implement. You would need something to parse the tex
error output, extract text which could be then searched for in the org
file. As mentioned, the problem is tex errors don't always contain that
information, so you would probably also have to parse the tex file and
then try to map that back to the corresponding part of the org file
(which assumes of course that it is the org data which has caused the
issue and not something relating to latex package or package
configuration).

-- 
Tim Cross