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13 Exporting

At some point you might want to print your notes, publish them on the web, or share them with people not using Org. Org can convert and export documents to a variety of other formats while retaining as much structure (see Document Structure) and markup (see Markup for Rich Contents) as possible.

The libraries responsible for translating Org files to other formats are called back-ends. Org ships with support for the following back-ends:

  • ascii (ASCII format)
  • beamer (LaTeX Beamer format)
  • html (HTML format)
  • icalendar (iCalendar format)
  • latex (LaTeX format)
  • md (Markdown format)
  • odt (OpenDocument Text format)
  • org (Org format)
  • texinfo (Texinfo format)
  • man (Man page format)

Users can install libraries for additional formats from the Emacs packaging system. For easy discovery, these packages have a common naming scheme: ox-NAME, where NAME is a format. For example, ox-koma-letter for koma-letter back-end. More libraries can be found in the ‘contrib/’ directory (see Installation).

Org only loads back-ends for the following formats by default: ASCII, HTML, iCalendar, LaTeX, and ODT. Additional back-ends can be loaded in either of two ways: by configuring the org-export-backends variable, or by requiring libraries in the Emacs init file. For example, to load the Markdown back-end, add this to your Emacs config:

(require 'ox-md)
• The Export Dispatcher  The main interface.
• Export Settings  Common export settings.
• Table of Contents  The if and where of the table of contents.
• Include Files  Include additional files into a document.
• Macro Replacement  Use macros to create templates.
• Comment Lines  What will not be exported.
• ASCII/Latin-1/UTF-8 export  Exporting to flat files with encoding.
• Beamer Export  Producing presentations and slides.
• HTML Export  Exporting to HTML.
• LaTeX Export  Exporting to LaTeX and processing to PDF.
• Markdown Export  Exporting to Markdown.
• OpenDocument Text Export  Exporting to OpenDocument Text.
• Org Export  Exporting to Org.
• Texinfo Export  Exporting to Texinfo.
• iCalendar Export  Exporting to iCalendar.
• Other Built-in Back-ends  Exporting to a man page.
• Advanced Export Configuration  Fine-tuning the export output.
• Export in Foreign Buffers  Author tables and lists in Org syntax.