Re: Changed behaviours of LaTeX exporter in version 8.0+

[Richard Lawrence <richard.lawrence@berkeley.edu>]

Hi Joseph,

"Kyeong Soo (Joseph) Kim" <kyeongsoo.kim@gmail.com> writes:

> Great thanks for your answering my two questions, especially sharing your
> experience for cross-referencing in LaTeX export.
>
> Though your suggestion for cross-referencing is an excellent workaround, I
> wonder whether there is any benefit using org-mode in writing papers in
> this case; for instance, manual setting of CUSTOM_ID would be a hassle,
> considering that it can be easily & automatically done in LaTeX with
> AUCTeX/RefTeX's label function.

Don't you need to make sure that your sections have a consistent label
in order to refer to them?

At any rate, one of the reasons I use this solution is that I want to be
able to easily use plain LaTeX at points where I discover that I can't
make Org do everything I want.  One of the cases I was worried about,
for example, is having a section reference inside an embedded LaTeX
block.  If you don't know the label ahead of time, you can't use a raw
\ref command inside #+BEGIN_LATEX...#+END_LATEX.  So I like being able
to set the labels via CUSTOM_ID on an as-needed basis. (I don't do it
for every section.)

You might be able to get away with less; it looks to me like the
[[*Foo][Section Foo]] still produces a link to a headline in LaTeX
output.  Does that not work for you?

> I still don't know why the new export engine has brought so many
> compatibility issues in its behavior.  It seems that I'd better go
> back to the prior version (7.X) in order to focus on my research.

The new export engine was a complete re-write, and came with an attempt
to define and standardize Org syntax.  Some of the incompatibilities are
due to that standardization: the old LaTeX and HTML exporters might
treat some text differently, for example, or not deal with some corner
case, so in writing a new export engine, it was necessary to define the
correct behavior.  Other incompatibilities are just bugs that come with
any new piece of software; the exporter is under heavy development and
those are constantly getting fixed.

The new exporter really is a *lot* better, and in my experience it is
worth the effort to upgrade.  I found myself bumping into the
limitations of the pre-8.0 exporter very frequently.  If you don't, you
can wait, but I think you'll find the new exporter a lot easier to work
with and to get help with.

Best,
Richard

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