Re: About exporting

[Juan Manuel Macías]

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!

These days I'm working on a book (a dictionary) of over 1000 pages. The
preamble contains 1813 lines of code (+/-), and is written separately in
a Org document, through literary programming. Contains: a) A lot of
(La)TeX code written (or perpetrated) by me, b) some Lua functions to
control certain parts of the process, c) all the configuration for Xindy
(the indexes) in Common Lisp (inside a filecontents* environment).
Everything, of course, ordered by sections. With this cocktail it seems
that something can go wrong at some point :-) However I find it very
easy to debug having things well separated. And I can always tangle
different versions of the preamble...

As I have already mentioned, I use Org Publish intensively. Some parts
of my Org Publish setup for this project are:

[...]
:base-directory "~/Git/DHTC/libro/org/"
:base-extension "org"
; *.tex files and output
:publishing-directory "~/Git/DHTC/libro/tex/"
:publishing-function org-latex-publish-to-latex
:body-only t
:exclude "DHTC-master\\.org\\|bibli-dhtc\\.org"

Each part of the book is an *org document that I export to *tex using
Org-Publish (:body-only t). And each document only includes at the
beginning:

#+SETUPFILE: diccionario.setup
#+INCLUDE: "elisp"

(that is, a setup file and a file that I have named `elisp' where I include
functions and filters).

And then I have a master document, as simple as possible, where the
preamble and the subdocuments are added through '\input{...}'. I have
defined this macro:

#+MACRO: input (eval (if (org-export-derived-backend-p 
org-export-current-backend 'latex) (concat "@@latex:\\input{@@" $1 ".tex" 
"@@latex:}@@") $1))

And, with a simple Elisp function, I compile the final document (or
parts of it) using latexmk (with `start-process-shell-command'). I add
an argument so that a dedicated buffer is generated with the output of
latexmk. As latexmk runs in interactive mode, every time I do a change
in a subdocument and call Org-Publish again, latexmk rebuilds everything
automatically. The latexmk output is very neat and warns of possible
errors. Also I always have an alternative branch in the repository to do
tests when I put 'experimental' code.

By all this I mean that using LaTeX from Org (but without stopping using
LaTeX) gives me a pretty productive and organized workflow. I recommend
try it out for large books.

Best regards,

Juan Manuel