Mats Tage Axelsson has a short introduction to making beautiful documents with Org-mode. None of this will be news to regular Irreal readers who are used to me (all too) frequently writing about it. Axelsson shows the basic format of an Org-mode document and moves on to the export menu where you can choose the format you want your final document in.

I found his discussion of tags to be useful and learned a bit about the tags: option to control how, if at all, tags are exported to the final document. His discussion of the meta-data options ( #+TITLE: , #+AUTHOR: , etc.) is marred a bit because he left off the colons on some of them.

The other oddity in his discussion is his explanation for why exporting to PDF is under the LaTeX heading in the export menu. His explanation makes no sense to me. Rather, I think it’s more likely that’s it’s under LaTeX because the Org document is first converted to LaTeX and then TeX is used to compile the LaTeX into a PDF. That makes a lot of sense because you can add mathematical notation to your Org file and have it typeset by TeX to get the best possible result.

His discussion is, as I suggested, elementary but it points the way for N00bs to get started and, more importantly in my opinion, makes the case that there’s no need to abandon your soul to the horror that is Word and it’s evil offspring. Although he doesn’t explicitly make the point, even if you must provide an ODT or docx document, you can still write in the comfort of Emacs and Org-mode and simply export the result to one of those formats. Of course, that makes dealing with editors and collaborators a little harder but there are solutions for those problems too.

UPDATE : Added link to Axelsson’s article.