Org-mode LaTeX Export Issue

Fri, May 16, 2014

I realize this advice may only be relevant to a few souls in this degraded world, but I wanted to document an issue I had when using the org-mode LaTeX exporter with biblatex and James Clawson’s MLA style package.

My template automatically exports babel as one of the LaTeX headers when exporting from org. If the default language is set as “en,” the org exporter will append “,english” as a babel option. This option causes Clawson’s package to place ending punctuation outside quotation marks, among other possible effects.

I didn’t want to change the variable globally, but you can set “#+LANGUAGE :nil” in your header, and “english” will no longer be appended. There will still be a comma after your language setting in the babel options, but, while unsightly, it doesn’t break anything.

I’m sure there’s a more elegant solution to this problem, but I couldn’t find it. I also ran into sectioning problems if I tried to import multiple files into an org master file for eventual LaTeX export. Having the entire book MS in one file solves these problems. Org-mode’s folding features make it more feasible than it might seem to have a 100K MS in a single file.

Another indispensable innovation I’ve discovered for working with reftex and zotero is Robin Wilson’s AutoZotBib, which will automatically synchronize a *.bib file with your zotero library.