> I tried this:
>
> #+LATEX_HEADER: "\usepackage{longtable}"
>
> No effects?
>
AFAIK, the quotes are not necessary, but the reason it's not
working is indeed that your version of org-mode doesn't know about
LATEX_HEADER at all.
It was implemented with this commit:
commit 20364d043a51c3c71493369c58a43b49566dbdaa
Author: Carsten Dominik <carsten.dominik@gmail.com>
Date: Thu Oct 2 15:00:14 2008 +0200
Implement #+LATEX_HEADER special.
Proposed by Austin Frank and apparently also by Russel Adams.
which I believe appeared in
release_6.08
Note that the commit is two years old.
> >
> > > I also looked at the manual to selectively export a part of the org
> > > file. They talk about the "org-export-select-tags" and
> > > "org-export-exclude-tags"; these variables don't even exist?
> >
> > They do. Are you still using that old org version 5.x? If so, well,
> > then maybe there were no such variables. And somewhen in org version
> > 6.x the export facilities were completely rewritten, so I guess you are
> > pretty alone with your problems unless you get a recent version.
>
> For the time being I am stuck with this version. I am sending a request to
> our IT group to upgrade Emacs to the most recent version for the version of
> RedHat we have, this should have a more recent version of org-mode, if I am
> lucky that should be done in a couple weeks. In the mean time I will
> manually add, or exclude, what I want from the exported "*.tex" file.
>
A couple of weeks?!? And you are not even sure which version of emacs
and org-mode you are going to get? I'd say, build your own: get
emacs/orgmode from the git mirror and build it yourself, install it in
your home directory if necessary. Even if it takes you a week or two to
get it done, at the end of it you'll be much better off at the end of
it.
If you have a community of users, this might be more difficult, but maybe
you can exercise concerted pressure on your IT dept: they might be more
willing to listen to ten people than to one.
If you are reasonably comfortable with git and make, it should only take
an hour or so to update/build/install; and assuming you stay with
"released" versions, you will only have to do that every couple of
months.
In addition, depending on what emacs version you have, you might be able
to run recent org-mode even if your emas is old (certainly on emacs 23,
probably on emacs 22, and just maybe on emacs 21, although I'm not sure
about these). That might be enough for your purposes and it reduces
time requirements to just a few minutes every month or two.
FWIW, the only use I have of whatever emacs gets installed with a system
is to bootstrap the latest emacs/orgmode: after that, it's deleted (or
at least, never used again).
Nick