Control HTML and LaTeX export in Org mode

Emacs Org mode is a very powerful, versatile and extensible package, which can be used for personal information management, organization and publication of blog posts, realization of a GTD system, etc. Using a simple markup grammar, we can easily obtain a nice typographical effect by exporting the text file into various formats, such as PDF, LibreOffice document, HTML, LaTeX, Freeplane mind map, TaskJuggler, iCalendar and so on. During my daily work, typesetting math with LaTeX and publishing them as blog posts are common tasks. In this post, I’ll summarize those variables provided by Org mode, which aim to finely control the behavior of LaTeX fragment processing as well as HTML and LaTeX document export.

• org-export-with-LaTeX-fragments: when it is true, LaTeX fragments export using MathJax mode is enabled.

• org-export-html-mathjax-options: it specifies the URL of MathJax script, scaling of all equations, alignment and indentation of display equations, and whether MathML should be enabled. A global configuration looks like this.

  (setq org-html-mathjax-options
     '((path "http://localhost/js/MathJax/MathJax.js")
       (scale "100")
       (align "center")
       (indent "2em")
       (mathml nil)))
  

  A per-file configuration can also be added to the beginning of an Org file as below.

  #+MATHJAX: path:"http://localhost/js/MathJax/MathJax.js" scale:"100" align:"center" indent:"2em" mathml:nil 
  

• org-export-htmlize-output-type: it controls the output type used by the htmlize module for typesetting code snippets wrapped between #+BEGIN_SRC and #+END_SRC. Possible choices are

  • css: to export the CSS selectors only;
  • inline-css: to export the CSS attribute values as inline HTML.

• org-export-with-TeX-macros: when it is non-nil, simple TeX-like macros will be interpreted in the export. For example, HTML export will convert \alpha to α and \AA to Å. Not only real TeX macros will work here, but also the standard HTML entities for math can be used as macro names as well. I set it to nil because I do not want to convert simple TeX-like macros into HTML.

• org-export-html-style: this variable specifies an Org-wide CSS style for exported HTML files. It should contain the full HTML structure to provide a style, including the surrounding HTML tags. A typical configuration is as below.

  (setq org-export-html-style
    "<link rel=\"stylesheet\" type=\"text/css\" href=\"main.css\">")
  

  In the above CSS file main.css, you should consider to include style definitions for the following classes: title, todo, done, timestamp, timestamp-kwd, tag, target.

• org-export-html-style-extra: this variable holds additional style information for HTML export. The value of this variable is inserted into the HTML buffer right after the value of org-export-html-style. Use this variable for per-file settings and do not forget to surround the style settings with <style>...</style> tags.

• org-format-latex-header: this variable stores the LaTeX header for processing LaTeX fragments not a complete LaTeX document, so the LaTeX header should include a directive \pagestyle{empty} in order that the page number be disabled. A typical configuration looks like below, in which the template argument [PACKAGES] is to be replaced by the values stored in org-export-latex-default-packages-alist and org-export-latex-packages-alist.

  \documentclass{article}
  \usepackage{fullpage}         % do not remove
  [NO-DEFAULT-PACKAGES]
  \input{generic}
  \input{math}
  \input{font-selection}
  [PACKAGES]
  \pagestyle{empty}             % do not remove"
  

• org-format-latex-options: this variable contains options for creating images from LaTeX fragments, such as foreground and background colors as well as scale in both Emacs editor and exported HTML, string pattern for matching the beginning of a math equation. It can be configured as below.

  (setq org-format-latex-options
    '(
      :foreground default
      :background "Transparent"
      :scale 1.2
      :html-foreground "Black"
      :html-background "Transparent"
      :html-scale 1.0 
      :matchers 
        ("begin" "$1" "$" "$$" "\\(" "\\[")))