Re: org-mode export to (latex) PDF

[Tim Cross]

Stefan Nobis <stefan-ml@snobis.de> writes:

> Maybe. I'm currently myself struggling a little bit with a flexible
> configuration, that can be used with many different kind of documents
> (short notes, larger reports, beamer presentations) and provides all
> the extras I like to use. There is no clear best package list for
> every use case (in some cases unnecessary loaded packages only waste
> time, in other cases, especially with some individual set of package
> options, there might be errors in some scenario or another).
>

I think this is the big stumbling bloc for having multi-lingual
documents 'out of the box'. It is hard enough to get a reliable default
configuration which will work for a majority of use cases with support
for just one language.

The good news is that threads like this have some really useful
information in them. My suggestion would be to create a page in worg
dedicated to configuring multi-lingual support. If we cannot make org
mode do what people need 'out of the box', lets at least make it easier
for them to find some good examples, suggestions and configuration
guidelines.

I have the disability of only knowing one language, so probably not
something I can help with much. However, I have always found configuring
desired fonts a drag when it comes to Latex based documents - not that
it is too hard, but more that each time I need to do it, I've forgotten
the steps and and wading through the information is a pain (especially
once you mix in outdated advice, different tex engines etc). I might see
if I can write up something concise which focuses on UTF-8 and selecting
a specific font. 

>> Is it possible to provide reasonable defaults for fonts?
>
> I do not think so. You want Cyrillic. But what about Japanese,
> Chinese, Devanagari, Tamil, Arabic etc? I doubt that there exists a
> single font that supports all these scripts satisfactorily. Despite
> the existence of the Unicode encoding(s), the glyphs and font designs
> are still quite complex and demanding even for a single script.
>
> But maybe we could assemble a list of good (enough) fonts for
> different languages/scripts and provide a default setup in Org for
> LaTeX export, that sets a proper font for the chosen document
> language?

I think such a list would be a really good addition to worg.

-- 
Tim Cross