What's the reason to use Pandoc to convert .org files to LaTeX instead of the built-in Org Mode LaTeX exporter? Serious question - I do plenty of .org -> LaTeX like this, and never tried the Pandoc route before.
That's true, though I'm increasingly wondering whether that's a bad thing. Emacs can be run in "batch mode", so it could be used just like every other stage in the pipeline (a bit heavy, though not much compared to modern tools). Then again, I never tried it.
When I started writing a static site generator powering my current personal site, I wanted to parse .org files in the generator. I very quickly gave up and decided to manually export my .org posts to HTML, and parse that instead (see [0]). I didn't realize back then that Pandoc can handle .org files; I probably would have decided to shell out to it instead. Then again, if there's one thing I learned writing a static site generator (twice), it's that the next time around, I'll pick up one that's already written by someone else :).
For some reason, emacs to pdf or latex errors out for some .sty file being missing. I could probably fix it, but pandoc works out of the box so I guess I’ll be sticking with it.