Matheus Augusto da Silva has an interesting video that details how he uses Emacs and Org-mode to write summaries of his class notes. After a class, he likes to write a half page summary of his notes. He finds that limiting the summary to half a page helps him to think about the important points and distill down the content. You may or may not like that approach but his workflow could be useful in other situations.
What’s nice is that there’s quite a bit of formatting of his PDF output but da Silva handles all that with a LaTeX include file and headers. The actual text is entered in an Org file and includes virtually no LaTeX other than some coloring macros.
Even if you no longer need to worry about organizing your study materials, da Silva’s workflow shows how it’s easy to produce richly formatted PDF output by entering plain text into an Org file. He doesn’t have a link to his include file but there is a link to his configuration that includes the skeletons that he uses for his Org file headers.
The video is 9 minutes and 55 seconds so you can probably watch it during a coffee break. As I said, I like the way he abstracts all the formatting to files so that he doesn’t need to think about it once his environment is set up.