I’ve been writing in Org mode for a long time. Every bit of Irreal began life as an Org doc and I have a huge collection of private documents that are also written in Org markup. The killer feature of Org is that I can export the same Org document to virtually any output format that I need. That’s mostly HTML and PDF for me but occasionally I’ll export to docx when I have to share with heathens.
I have always found that the native export functions work well for me but some people with special needs or especially complex documents find that they need more. Not to worry, Emacs, as usual, has you covered. You can also export to Pandoc and let it convert your Org document into virtually any format you can imagine.
İsmail Efe Top is one of those people who uses Pandoc for his exports. To be honest, it’s not clear to me that the native exporters wouldn’t work well for him but he certainly knows his requirements far better than I. Regardless, he has a useful post that shows you how to use Pandoc for exports if you need to.
As far as I can tell, Pandoc is mostly needed when exporting to docx but I’ve heard of some folks who feel that it does a better job of exporting to PDF than the native exporter. If you have to export to docx or feel that you need something more for PDF conversion, take a look at Top’s post to see how easy it is to add Pandoc into your exporting workflow.