Re: PDF export, table of contents and internal links

[Juan Manuel Macías]

Sébastien Gendre writes:

> If I learned LaTeX syntax in the past, I never take enough time to learn
> how work each compilation possibility. I feel lost with all the
> pdflatex, teklive, lualatex, double or quadruple compilation, etc.

The problem of multiple compilations is not related, in general, to the
TeX engine being used (pdfTeX, XeTeX, LuaTeX) but to LaTeX itself, which
continually needs to write and read auxiliary files. If, in addition,
you need to use citations, add an analytical index or other elements to
your work, you will also have to call the corresponding engines (bibtex,
biber, xindy, etc.) and compile again. And to all this is added that
there are specific packages that also need more than one compilation. So
it's often the best idea to let latexmk take care of all that instead of
compiling manually.

You may be interested in taking a look at another TeX format, ConTeXt,
not as popular as LaTeX but very powerful. It has certain advantages
over LaTeX. For my workflow, I prefer LaTeX. But there are users who can
be better served by ConTeXt, and they should be aware of it. Unlike
LaTeX, whose concept is of a minimal kernel that can be extended by
packages, ConTeXt starts from a monolithic kernel, which includes
everything or almost everything. In other words, it is not necessary to
load a package for this, another package for that, etc. Its interface is
more minimalist than the LaTeX interface and its compilation process is
(I think) faster. And, on the Org side, we luckily already have a
ConTeXt exporter, ox-context, written by Jason Ross:

https://github.com/Jason-S-Ross/ox-context/

There is a very complete introductory manual to ConTeXt written by
Joaquín Ataz López, with translations into various languages, including
English and French:

https://github.com/contextgarden/not-so-short-introduction-to-context

> Do you have good articles or book to suggest about this part of LaTeX ?

A good read might be: /The Not so Short Introduction to LaTeX2e/
(https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=the not so short introduction to
latex2e)

And if you dare to program at a low level in pure TeX, this is very
good: /TeX for the Impatient/
(http://mail.tug.org/TUGboat/tb11-4/tb30ads.pdf)

> To come back to "org-latex-pdf-process", I only added "-shell-escape"
> for the minted package. To have beautify code block. But maybe it exist
> better solution ? Someone have experience with Engrave Faces ?

The -shell-escape flag only makes sense if you need to call an external
process during compilation (as in the case of minted). It is also
necessary if you need to use an indexing engine like xindy. But apart
from these cases and some more, an org user will have more advantages
using babel.

I use Minted, but I'm not convinced. It also has some problems with
certain LaTeX packages. I have Engrave Faces on my TODO list to try. And
possibly I will migrate to it...

Best regards,

Juan Manuel