I have a longstanding fascination with document layout. It’s something I first learned from Rich Stevens. His books were always visually beautiful with a layout that showed an obsessive attention to detail. Fortunately, he wrote about his process extensively on his Website and was generous with his help when I was laying out my first book.
Like Stevens, I wrote and typeset my books with Groff. These days, I do all my writing with Org mode so I’m always interested in ways the make Org mode exports look better. I recently I came across two posts that address this very problem.
The first is by Norman Walsh. His interest is customizing PDF output from Org files. He didn’t like the way the default output made his documents look like academic papers. He includes output from both the default method and his customized method so that you can see the differences.
The second is by Colin McLear, a teacher who wants to use the same Org file to produce
- A set of notes for his students
- A set of slides for his lectures
- A handout version of the slides with additional content
Walsh’s post contains all his configuration except his setup files. Those are available in his GitHub repository.
Neither of these setups are likely to be exactly what you want but they’re ripe with ideas and show you how to make your own customizations. The ability to do this means that there’s no reason to do your writing in anything but Org. If you have special output requirements, it’s pretty easy to realize them with some simple configuration.
UPDATE : Added link to McLear’s post.