Endnotes with Org-mode

Date: 15 July 2014

I was recently writing an internal peer review for work. Because I’m a happy emacs user, I wrote the peer review in org-mode and exported it to PDF using org-latex-export-to-pdf. The problem was that our interal format requires that I use endnotes and emacs exports my footnotes as, well, footnotes. So, here’s the quick and dirty on how I got the exporter to give me end notes.

First of all, you need to tell LaTeX that you want to use endnotes. I put it at the begining of my org file with the rest of the boilerplate.

#+LaTeX_HEADER: \usepackage{endnotes}
#+LaTeX_HEADER: \let\footnote=\endnote

The first line loads the endnotes packge and the second says that you want it to treat your footnotes as if they were endnotes.

Then, at the end of your document, drop this block.

* Endnotes
#+LaTeX: \begingroup
#+LaTeX: \parindent 0pt
#+LaTeX: \parskip 2ex
#+LaTeX: \def\enotesize{\normalize}
#+LaTeX: \theendnotes
#+LaTeX: \endgroup

That works great except that LaTeX will drop a second heading called “Notes”, by default. Well, I’m using my own heading so that it shows up nicely in the table of contents. It’s possible to make the heading go away with this line.

#+LaTeX_HEADER: \renewcommand{\notesname}{}

Unfortunately, it leaves the extra space where the heading would have been. I’m sure there’s a way to get rid of that but I didn’t take the time to figure it out. If you know, drop a comment below.