Irreal regulars know that I use Org mode for almost all my writing. There are these blog posts, of course, written with Org mode and published with org2blog but also reports, letters, and pretty much everything else. Org mode is very flexible and can produce HTML or, via LaTeX, PDF1.
Not everybody is convinced, however. RMS famously doubted that Org mode was up to producing Emacs documentation. Others insist that you have to use Word or LaTeX for serious documents.
Katherine Cox-Buday has a nice post that should help put an end to those doubts. She writes specifications for Canonical and uses Org mode to quickly produce very polished documents.
As an example, she starts with a toy specification written in Org mode and shows how its looks when it’s exported to PDF. It’s not bad but with a customized LaTeX document class, the same input produces a beautiful document that looks as if a lot of labor went into its formatting. In truth, the source was just a simple Org document.
Read her post to see both outputs. Perhaps it will give you some ideas for your own documents. More importantly, though, it shows how Org mode with its light-weight markup can produce beautiful documents quickly and easily.
Footnotes:
And lots of other formats, of course.