I keep seeing statements from the uninformed to the effect that you can’t use Org-mode for “serious” writing. First it was, “you can’t use Org-mode for journal articles.” After John Kitchin put the lie to that story, the naysayers moved on to, “Org-mode could never be used for GNU manuals, except we have this.
The latest skirmish is about whether you can use Org-mode to write your thesis. Despite the many examples of people doing just that, we still have plenty of people saying it can’t/shouldn’t be done.
Daniel Gomez was having none of that and wrote a very nice post showing how to set up an Org-mode thesis writing environment. His thesis has all the pain points that the naysayers claim makes writing a thesis with Org-mode too hard or impossible. It’s a scientific thesis so it’s got equations, figures, and code; large parts of the thesis were published in journals with other formatting requirements; and finally, his thesis supervisor prefers to use Microsoft Word.
Gomez shows how to overcome all these obstacles and write both the journal articles and thesis in Org-mode. The journal articles can imported directly into the thesis because he’s tagged the unwanted content and formatting to be ignored when it’s used in the thesis.
If you’re about to write your thesis and would like to do so in the comfortable Org-mode environment, take a look at Gomez’s post.