A week ago I received "The Org Mode 7 Reference Manual", published by Network Theory Ltd as a reward for some Perl programming help I had given. I had already been reading parts of the book and so far Org mode for Emacs looks very, very useful to me, especially since I still keep todo lists on paper in a notebook. That works quite well until one wants to keep track of how much time was spent on a todo item.
Today I started with my first org file; documentation of how
I am configuring a fresh Ubuntu 10.04 LTS installation on my
development machine, a Dell Vostro 200 ST. And when I had
some text entered in the Org file I wanted to check out how
it would look as PDF. So I pressed C-c C-e d
and nothing happened.
My first guess was that pdflatex was not
installed since Org uses this program to convert the
generated LaTeX to PDF. And indeed, when I exported the Org
file as LaTeX only, using C-c C-e l, and tried
to run pdflatex on the generated file I got a
message that the program was not installed.
So I used
sudo apt-get install texlive-latex-base
to install the pdflatex program and tried again
C-c C-e d in GNU Emacs. This time the Document
Viewer did open a PDF file but I didn't see any text at all.
So I again ran pdflatex on the exported LaTeX
file at the command line and got many lines of output,
giving me the impression that a font file (or several) where
missing. The output was followed by a prompt which I could
exit by pressing Ctrl+D. I used Google to search for a
solution using the following part of the output given:
grep: ecrm1095.log: No such file or directory
And the first result, Bug#421919:
fiaif: FTBFS: I can't find file `ecrm1095'., had a solution by
Dr. Frank Küster: adding tl-latex-recommended
. I assumed
that tl stood for texlive, and indeed
after:
sudo apt-get install texlive-latex-recommended
I was able to generate a PDF file from the Org file I was
working on from GNU Emacs and view the result in the
automatically started Document Viewer using just C-c
C-e d. Very impressive.
And when one leaves the Document Viewer open, modifies the
Org file and uses C-c C-e d to export the PDF again
Document Viewer updates the view automatically; this is great for
keeping a preview around.