ox-pandoc VS FastFold

You can use the ox-pandoc library to export from Org Mode in Emacs to 65 different formats (at time of writing) including all the ones you mention.

For some formats that pandoc does not output, there are also specialised ox-format libraries.

There are even several exporters to Github-flavoured markdown. I personally find both ox-pandoc and ox-gfm very useful for that purpose.

https://github.com/kawabata/ox-pandoc

Orgmode's page about tools about import & export actually includes both to an entry about export to pandoc (ox-pandoc) as well as import from pandoc (org-pandoc-import).

You need to install some package for that; have a look at https://github.com/kawabata/ox-pandoc for example.

The ox-pandoc package is really useful (you need to have pandoc itself installed) and can export to epub using just the export function of org-mode itself. (That, in turn, is described thoroughly in the org manual.)

It's always nice to see someone from the humanities interested in Emacs. I suspect that you'll find the best experience by using Org mode + Pandoc. This will let you write in a rather nice plaintext environment, and then export that to a .docx file. I don't think the styling will be great (could well be wrong though), but it should work fairly well :) Importing (from .docx to .org) is likely to be less smooth, but still decent.

Can also export directly to word through pandoc as well; there's a package ox-pandoc, which lets you do just that, and you can even include a reference document in case you need to have custom styles added to it.

If you want an easy, bare bones PDF export that is not LaTeX and doesn't require a bunch of fiddling to make it not look an LaTeX article, using ox-pandoc with the "mspdf" export (using pdfroff as the pdf generator) is decent. It doesn't support embedded images, but is otherwise pretty robust.

Just be aware that the marker based folding can be annoying to collaborators if you are working on documents with other authors. With a plugin like FastFold [0] you should be able to have fast folding with the expr foldtype.

[0]: https://github.com/Konfekt/FastFold

If you don't get great results, try changing 'foldmethod' (syntax is usually best but indent often works well). If vim doesn't have syntax support for your language, find a plugin that offers it. Even better if it defines 'foldtext' so your methods collapse down into an easy to read outline. I use vim-ficklefold to manage folds and FastFold to prevent syntax folds from making vim slow.

FastFold

Could be foldmethod=syntax that's slow, try FastFold.

FastFold, fauxClip, syntaxMarkerFold

I have have the same problem. I found this plugin FastFold that seems to be what we are looking for but I haven't had the chance to test it yet. The general idea is to stop autofolding under most circumstances except when it makes sense.

Check out FastFold plugin

Because in this case the way this plugin works causes folds to recomputed. Fold methods syntax and expr are slow, cause those are written in Vim script instead directly in C. Plugin FastFold lets you change this behaviour and update folds only on demand.

Some of those rules can be quite heavy on large files, so FastFold really helps here. It also prevents uncontrolled folds opening when editing, so just added bonus. Another plus are temporary manual folds.