Beautiful and simple pdf-latex exports with org mode

If you also find yourself writing a lot of essays and assignments in org-mode, taking advantage of its nearly natural syntax, but the end result, when exporting to PDF, disappoints you, this article is for you.

Historically, there were many different many different solutions to producing a scientific paper, or publishing any kind of digital document, for that matter.

Initially what mattered most was the document’s final appearance on paper, making programs such as roff, quite popular. I mean, I remember like yesterday studying the legendary book duo of The Unix Programming Environment and The C Programming Language, which were (if I’m not mistaken) using a roff derivative. Aren’t they beautiful?

However, roff and its derivatives had their limitations. In a computerphile youtube video, some time in the past I remember professor Brailsford taking about the sheer difficulty of working with mathematics in that environment¹

Another alternative was Donald Knuth’s TeX. Being too young for that, I have only played around with its only(?) still usable derivative: LaTeX. That system is so powerful, you can create presentations, papers, cvs, all in a very smooth and straightforward manner.

I sincerely believe it to be the most versatile way of writing any type of documents, however, it has a relatively steep learning curve.

LaTeX might be more than simply wonderful as a publication backend, with templates being freely available on the Internet, but it is not so easy to write in² - mainly because for most of us, LaTeX will most probably be used only once in a while and that will force us to revise or search online for stuff that we once knew how to do.

This is where org-mode and org-export comes in.

The Org ecosystem is a wonderful environment. It is the main feature that keeps me using Emacs instead of moving back to my simpler roots. It is a plain text format with the simplest syntax I have ever seen out there, many times easier and more intuitive than markdown, full of interesting features and constantly improved, due to the plethora of experienced Org users out there, through a suite of rather helpful complementary packages to make your life even easier.

From snippets, to inline LaTeX for mathematics, to inline images for more difficult subjects, to syncing notes with books… I mean, what more is there to do??

(This would be also a good point in the article to say the following: Org is fun to work in )

Back to what I promised, org-mode is not a LaTeX replacement and it was never meant to be. Its consistency and standardized format is what makes it so useful for producing pretty documents: it can be exported to many different formats: LaTeX (and thus PDFs), html (this blog is powered by Org), markdown…

Let’s see what exactly is needed for a seamless LaTeX experience within Org.

In general, almost everything I describe here can be achieved on a vanilla Emacs installation, since Org ships with Emacs. No need to overcomplicate things.

There is only one package I only find myself using way too much when writing in Org-mode, and that is CDLatex, by the creator of org-mode. I’ll try to publish an article on it soon, comparing it to snippet managers and providing an analysis on how I have integrated it into my more general workflow, allowing for seamless LaTeX snippets inside of Org.

(use-package cdlatex
    :hook (org-mode . org-cdlatex-mode))

What it essentially allows us to do is treat the buffer as a mix of LaTeX and Org, easily utilizing the first one’s math commands (and more detailed at times) syntax. For example this

\begin{equation}
E = mc
\end{equation}

Would give us:

Now we open an Emacs buffer pointing to an Org file (a plain text file with the .org extension).

You will need to set some headers up top. These provide information for the rest of the document, and the most basic ones are the following (these are actually the ones used for this article):

#+TITLE: Beautiful and simple pdf-latex exports with org mode
#+DATE: <2023-04-06 15:28>
#+DESCRIPTION: C'est la vie ;; feel free to use better decriptions
#+FILETAGS: emacs org-mode 

You can find more options to set, such as the following ones, but I generally only set these before I export to LaTeX.

#+SUBTITLE:  dunno
#+AUTHOR: chatziiola
#+LANGUAGE: el ;; Obviously this one is not needed if you are not writing Greek

There are more specific options, that essentially modify the behavior (or certain aspects) of the export process you choose. In our case, since we are interested in LaTeX export, the main options to set are the following:

#+latex_class_options: [a4paper,11pt]
#+latex_compiler: xelatex
#+latex_header: \input{/path/to/sample.tex}

The first one specifies the paper and font size for our LaTeX export and is in fact the optional argument that will get passed at the \documentclass{article} statement at the beginning of our exported LaTeX buffer.

The second one, changes the default latex compiler to xelatex, something rather unnecessary for most, but really helpful to those of us who regularly use characters of more than one language in their documents, since the polyglossia package makes it unbelievably easy.³

The third one, is how you can turn a decent looking PDF (the one that gets exported by default) into one that is tailored to your liking.

At that point, if you have a document that has an appropriately created list of header options (#+ statements), and a suitable sample.tex file, you are ready to create your own beautiful documents:

1. C-c C-e while you are on your document’s buffer
2. l to select the LaTeX submenu
3. o to export as a PDF file and open it upon completion

Your PDF file will be there waiting for you.

Feel free to play around the process, modifying the tex file to create a template to your liking. If you have any questions or have found some inconsistencies and mistakes in the article, feel free to add a comment with them.

You may also want to have a look at my notetaking system setup. I’m trying to build a detailed analysis of that system before I implement a series functionality in this blog. This article will, then, be part of the notetaking in emacs series.