Writing Documents with Org Mode
Motivation
For work, I often find myself writing documents for the projects I'm on. Usually, I just open Emacs and start a LaTeX file, but this time I thought I'd try using Org mode for writing the document. There were a couple of motivations for this, in one case, I needed to generate a presentation and I'd seen enough posts about exporting to a PDF via Beamer to finally take the plunge and try it for myself. In the second case, I had been taking a bunch of notes and computing metrics in tables.
Beamer
Getting started with this document took a little longer because I didn't know what I was looking for. I needed to add #+STARTUP: Beamer to the top of my file and then press C-c C-c on that line to get the Beamer export options. The other confusing thing about exporting a presentation with Beamer is how the headlines work. Most of the examples I saw used #+OPTIONS: H:2 or #+OPTIONS: H:3. This sets the header level to export.
#+options: H:2 * header 1 This header is not exported ** header 2 This header is exported as the title of a frame *** header 3 This header is exported as a subsection on a frame
Once I figured out how that structure worked, I made quick progress on my presentation.
The themes available look nice, however, for a lot of them, I couldn't tell a difference between one and the next. I looked at the Beamer theme matrix, each row represents a theme, while each column represents a different color scheme. Looking across one row, several of the color schemes look identical to me. I hope I'm not missing something fundamental, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of variation. What is provided does look good. I chose to use the Dresden theme with the lily color scheme.
PDF Documents
This one was more straight forward. Out of the box, the result is pretty good. There are some tweaks to be made. Adding things to the preamble is as simple as adding another #+latex_header: option. In my case, I added the following:
#+latexheader: \usepackage{array} #+latexheader: \setlength{\parskip}{1em} #+latex_header: \newcommand{\tabcap}[2]{\caption{\label{tab:#1}{\textsc{\scriptsize #2}}}}
I have several tables in this particular document and I wanted to change the default font and size for the caption, so I provided a new command for that purpose. The array package is also used for the tables to help with column layout. I want a blank line between paragraphs, so I change the default parskip value.
Most of the document is based around the data I present in the metrics tables, so I wanted to control a couple aspects of the layout. Each table has a #+NAME:, a #+CAPTION: and some layout options specified with #+ATTR_LATEX:. The only challenge I did not overcome was the placement of the table caption. On export, the caption appears above the table, but I would prefer it to be below the table. I did not figure out how to adjust the placement of the caption, so I manually modified the tex. The downside of that approach is now I have to remember all the manual changes I make if I choose to maintain the org file and export again. In this case, I just moved to modifying the tex file instead of the org file.
Conclusion
I frequently use Org mode for managing my day at work. I track what tasks I'm working on, meetings to attend, time spent in each, and general note taking for each. It is nice to be able to section parts of the file into logical sections and be able to quicly navigate between them. Using the same power when writing documents to distribute as PDF files or as presentations is just as rewarding. You can even setup the org file for different kinds of exports by using C-c C-e # and choosing a template of options to insert. In the case of a Beamer file, remember to add the appropriate startup option and evaluate it first so the template exists to insert. In general, Org mode is a great place to start writing documents, or even finish them if you don't need to modify them manually in the external format.