Re: Org as a book publisher

[M . ‘quintus’ Gülker]

Am 06. März 2021 um 20:34 Uhr +0100 schrieb Juan Manuel Macías:
> I would like to share here two samples of one of the most intense
> uses that I give Org Mode: for typesetting, layout and editorial
> design. [...] The samples are from a book on classical philology,
> recently published here in Spain [...]. Naturally, what acts in the
> background here is TeX and LaTeX (specifically Lua(La)TeX), so what
> I really do is use Org and Org-Publish as a sort of high-level
> interface for LaTeX. But I don't mean to avoid LaTeX: in fact, I've
> been working with LaTeX for a long time. I like LaTeX and behind
> these jobs there is a lot of LaTeX code. But Org gives me a much
> more light and productive workflow, allowing me to work at two
> levels.

Thank you very much for sharing. This is an interesting insight. Many
people seem to use org rather than direct LaTeX because they dislike
LaTeX's syntax or find LaTeX too complex, which I never really
understood. But you make some great points for why this combination is
useful other than for that reason.

> 2. Control of the composition process at various points. One of the
>    qualities of LuaTeX is the possibility to control TeX primitives
>    through scripts in Lua, and to act at various points in the pre- or
>    post-process. But I have realized that with the happy fusion of Elisp
>    and Org we can be much more precise and "surgical" ;-). Here,
>    Org/LaTeX is much more powerful than LuaLaTeX.

For those who still use pdfLaTeX rather than LuaLaTeX (probably due to
Microtype) there is not even an equivalent available.

> 4. An unique origin. The book can be produced on paper from a single
>    source, but you can also export, from that source consistently, to
>    other formats (HTML or Epub).

This is actually a strong argument. Even though I enjoy writing LaTeX
code, this one is a tough nut to crack with pure LaTeX, where I
achieved the best results with LaTeXML, but it was still lots of work.
May I ask what tooling you use to go from org to Epub?

  -quintus

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