Over at Opensource.com, Peter Prevos has a nice post on how to write LaTeX documents with Org mode. This is an advantage, he says, because it allows the writer to concentrate on the content of what they’re writing rather than worrying about LaTeX syntax or what the final result will look like.
Although making things simpler for beginners by using Emacs may seem counterintuitive, Prevos makes a good case for it. First, as already mentioned, it eliminates the need to be fluent in LaTeX. The simple Org syntax along with the fairly intuitive LaTeX math notation makes typing even technical documents easy.
Second, there’s no need to master Emacs either. As Prevos says, Emacs is only hard to learn when you reach the stage where you want to fine tune things. Beginners can simply accept vanilla Emacs and learn the finer points as they go along.
Finally, the document can be fine tuned by adding custom bits of LaTeX to either the header or a code block. This is easy to do after the document is mostly written and looking up arcane bits of LaTeX syntax won’t interfere with the flow of content creation.
There are a couple of miner mistakes in the post that are hardly worth mentioning since they don’t affect Prevos’ overall message. First, he calls the Meta key the Mod key and secondly he appears to think that all exporting involves Pandoc. As I say, neither of these is a serious matter and they won’t affect a user’s ability to produce nice documents with Org mode at all.
I like his post because it shows how knowing just a little LaTeX and Emacs is enough to produce beautiful documents easily without having to worry very much about LaTeX syntax.