Re: Org as a book publisher

[Juan Manuel Macías]

Hi Quintus:

Thank you very much for your comments.

M. ‘quintus’ Gülker <post+orgmodeml@guelker.eu> writes:

> [...] 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.

I think Org does a good job with what it offers out of the box for
`simple' documents, when the user also does not have a special interest
in LaTeX code and typographic `refinement'. But as the document becomes
more and more complex, there is a duty to study LaTeX and learn to write
code in LaTeX (even in pure TeX, if things get too demanding); and also
to study the documentation of the packages involved, because the great
power of LaTeX lies in its rich and extensive package ecosystem (two or
three new packages always appear every week!). If Org was a complete
translation of everything that each LaTeX package is capable of, then
Org would become as (needlessly) complex as LaTeX. The good thing about
Org is that it provides us with the tools needed to work with our LaTeX
code in the background. A simple example that comes to me now are the
lists, which in LaTeX can be managed in a very clean way with packages
like enumitem. In an Org document it would then be enough to put before
a list `#+ATTR_LaTeX: :options [enumitem options]' (or to write a
replacement macro), but of course the user have to read the enumitem
documentation...

(By the way, it seems that a fellow 'co-lister' is working on an Org to
Context exporter: https://github.com/Jason-S-Ross/ox-context/)

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

Well, Microtype can already be used in LuaLaTeX. Except for a few minor
limitations, protrusion and expansion properties work well. In fact I
recently wrote a custom table of protrusion values for a font, and
microtype reads them perfectly in LuaLaTeX. In general nowadays the
migration from pdfTeX to LuaTeX is quite smooth, and it is worth it, for
various reasons: for example, there are a few cool new packages that
take advantage of LuaTeX. And there is also the LuaTeX ability to use
otf fonts and manage opentypes features. XeTeX can do that too, but
with LuaTeX we can even define new otf features on the fly, in Lua, for
a document (like kerning, contextual substitution, etc.) and apply them
to a certain font, without need to edit that font with a dedicated
software (fontforge).

But yeah, for pre-/post-process control I prefer Elisp/Org a thousand
times over Lua :-) Recently I needed to modify certain combining
diacritical marks only in the italics, and with Org it's a delight to do
that (writing a filter for org-export-filter-italic-functions)

> [...] May I ask what tooling you use to go from org to Epub?

Ox-epub works reasonably well, in my short experience: I'm afraid I
haven't explored the Epub output much, partly because this is a format
that I do not like, and I have used it for editorial requirements only.
And, in fact, it is a very limited format for certain types of books.

Best regards,

Juan Manuel