I’ve written in the past on my astonishment about people who are able to take mathematics class notes in LaTeX fast enough to keep up with the instructor: 1, 2, and 3. Some people who do this use Emacs, some use Vim. In either case, it’s breathtaking to watch them.
Now Matt Maguire takes a look at it from the other side: producing class notes for students. Speed is not an issue here, of course, but getting a workable system involves more than just writing some LaTeX formulas and publishing them.
Maguire has a specific format in mind and has been producing notes in it for some time directly with LaTeX. But as an Emacs user, we wanted to leverage Org mode to simplify the production of the notes.
The nice thing about his exposition is that it’s widely applicable. You may not be a teacher or you may not want to produce notes involving mathematics but if you want to use anything other than the standard LaTeX article class, you have some work to do. Maguire’s post tells you how to set up another class and other custom settings you need for your unique environment.
All this may seem like a lot of work but you only have to do it once. After that, you just write whatever it is in Org as usual. The post demonstrates one of the (many) strengths of Org mode.
Update : Added link to Maguire’s post.