Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If I want to produce a well-formatted PDF, I directly write LaTeX with the help of some very nice Emacs modes. My experience is quite the opposite. I was a heavy LaTeX user, and stopped pure LaTeX years ago when I learned org mode. For the usual markup, Org mode syntax is much nicer than LaTeX's. And if I want custom LaTeX, Org mode lets me insert it in the document. I never manually write TeX or HTML documents any…
> My experience is quite the opposite. I was a heavy LaTeX user, and stopped pure LaTeX years ago when I learned org mode. For the usual markup, Org mode syntax is much nicer than LaTeX's. And if I want custom LaTeX, Org mode lets me insert it in the document. That's interesting! I googled a bit and found that people actually write research papers in org-mode. But in my experience (physics) that usually requires a lo…
You can pretty much embed any LaTeX code in your document. Org mode is usually smart enough to pick up command (\whatever) without any extra markup (I believe this works even for custom commands you defined yourself). Equations are surrounded by a single or double $. If you have other special stuff, you can explicitly put it in a block by itself and Org mode will pass it to the .tex file unmodified.
Yeah, coauthoring could be an issue.
>Frankly, Auctex with Reftex is so nice, I do not see the advantages of org-mode for my main use cases.
I'll confess that I was not an advanced Auctex user, so I can't compare. The author of org mode is a heavy latex user (astronomy professor), so I'm sure he made it good enough for his needs.
One thing I liked was the ability to insert Greek characters with minimal keystrokes (a for alpha, b for beta, etc). You can preview your equations just as you would with auctex.
This tutorial shows the capabilities in older versions of org mode. Not sure if there is an updated version: