Re: [O] Large LaTeX project in single file or using publishing

[Jorge A. Alfaro-Murillo]

Andreas Leha writes:

> On 2014-11-26, at 20:00, Jacob Gerlach wrote: 
> > Just my 2 cents: I'd go for LaTeX if heavy math typesetting is 
> > involved (then amsmath!), maybe for Org otherwise, check 
> > whether the template imposes a many-file structure (which it 
> > probably doesn't), and keep everything in one file. 
>
> I would disagree here. I do not see, that writing equations in 
> LaTeX is substantially easier than in org. Or put the other way 
> round: org's support for equations is quite good.

There is no way that writing equations can be faster in org than 
in AUCTeX, since AUCTeX is designed for that, especially with 
LaTeX-math-mode, two keys write any Greek symbol for example. And 
all the support for completion of commands, environments and 
environment variables, changing fonts, sectioning, integration 
with reftex... 

By the way, AUCTeX supports many packages by default including 
amsmath, so just adding the proper \usepackage{amsmath} in the 
preamble makes AUCTeX fontify in math-mode align, gather, 
multline, and their starred equivalents.

The one thing that org is better at is tables, but for that I use 
radiotables inside of AUCTeX.

> And preview-latex is really speeding me up.

I have never been a fan of preview or any WYSIWYG editing, I feel 
like it slows me down, but if you use only org and are not used to 
LaTeX it could be helpful, in AUCTeX it is easier to read math 
because of the fonts used (for example subscripts and superscripts 
are written under and over the symbols). I would also suggest 
compiling with SyncTeX for forward search support, I do not know 
if forward search is possible with org.

That being said there is a learning curve associated with 
TeX/AUCTeX and if you are already very comfortable with org and do 
not have time for learning something new, perhaps it is better to 
stick with org.

If you decide to go with LaTeX, the reason to split your 
dissertation in several chapters is so that the compilation can 
run faster, since when you change a chapter and compile only that 
chapter is compiled again.  This is a substantial gain in 
compilation time with big documents (books, dissertations). If you 
decide to go with several org files and the publishing mechanism 
or a single org file, I think that every time that you export the 
whole document needs to be compiled.

Best,

--
Jorge.