Beamer export: upgrade problem, and basic questions

[James Harkins <jamshark70@gmail.com>]

First, a kind of icky problem. I had some problems with the example presentation at [1] -- tags are exporting as bold text instead of being interpreted.

\item[Thanks to Eric Fraga \textbf{:BMCOL:B\_block:}]\label{sec-1.1.1}

I thought this was probably because of an old org version, so I downloaded org 7.8.03, checked paths in the Makefile, did "make" and "sudo make install." Now emacs shows org-version as 7.8.03, but C-c C-e p just gives me the message "org-export-preprocess-string: Cannot open load file: org-nil" -- 

Per this thread [2], I am looking for a variable called "backend-name" but it doesn't exist in my environment (C-h v backend-name ==> "no match"). I have no idea how to fix this.


Now...

Apologies in advance for what is surely a basic question. I've searched quite a bit online yesterday and today for a document about org-mode beamer export that goes a bit beyond the (very useful) "for dummies" tutorial at [3].

I am new to LaTeX. (*shame*) :-p

Since reading this, I've downloaded the LaTeXe and beamer PDF manuals and learned:

- It's going to take a while to learn to think like LaTeX. That's okay with me.

- The key is thinking about structure rather than layout. Like, yesterday I wanted to center and boldface a paragraph. "Center" and "boldface" might not be the right terms. Better to figure out a structural unit appropriate for the material. (One challenge here is that the Beamer user's guide doesn't have much in the way of summary.)

- If I'm going to influence the layout in anything more than a trivial way, I need to understand LaTeX environments.

- Beamer class export documentation [1] is really dense.

It would really help me to get some pointers on where to look first. I don't mind doing research, but it's a huge amount of documentation and I have no way right now to guess what's critical to read first, what's important and what I could leave for later.

Thanks,
James

[1] http://orgmode.org/manual/Beamer-class-export.html#Beamer-class-export
[2] http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.orgmode/39788
[3] http://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/org-beamer/tutorial.html


--
James Harkins /// dewdrop world
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