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Alternatively, for those who want good-looking text but prefer the WYSIWIG approach: just use a half-decent DTP program like InDesign, which will get you everyt

Alternatively, for those who want good-looking text but prefer the WYSIWIG approach: just use a half-decent DTP program like InDesign, which will get you everything mentioned in the article except for the per-character transparency.

scott_s 16y ago
Lyx is a Latex editor with WYSIWIG features: http://www.lyx.org/ http://www.lyx.org/
- omaranto 16y ago
  Also checkout TeXmacs: http://www.texmacs.org/ http://www.texmacs.org/
- stan_rogers 16y ago
  To pick a nit, Lyx is WYSIWYM (the M being "mean") -- they point that out a whole bunch of times in the doco.
- alok-g 16y ago
  A hyperlink is meant to be clickable, and it is not in either Lyx or TeXmacs. In this respect, they both fall short of WYSIWYG/M.
ugh 16y ago
InDesign is an absolutely awesome program, my favorite from Adobe next to Lightroom. Mac OS X’s font palette (while sucky in general and in dire need for a makeover to improve its UI — it’s like vintage 2000 or so) also offers you many of the mentioned features: 1 and 3 are on by default everywhere (type ‘shuffle’ into the Spotlight searchbox, ‘ffl’ will be turned into the appropriate ligature), 2, 4 and 5 are accessible through the palette but I don’t think OS X is clever about line-breaks (at least there are no settings to fine-tune). Don’t know about transparency. It is available to you in every program which uses OS X’s standard method of text input (like Pages or Safari).
- alextgordon 16y ago
  OS X's text system does have per character transparency. It's not exposed by TextEdit but it is exposed by Pages's color picker. You could retrofit smart justification onto the text system, but it would require some non-trivial code (namely an NSTypesetter subclass). It's not easy, but it's possible.
Niten 16y ago
Another advantage of LaTeX over WYSIWIG alternatives is its simple plaintext representation. If we can still open any documents from our time period in 200 years, we'll be able to open that old LaTeX document of yours, because it's just ASCII (or Unicode in the case of XeLaTeX). And given the portability and simple requirements of the open source, exceptionally well documented TeX code base, it isn't far fetched to imagine someone could even run your documents through the actual LaTeX typesetter, if they really wanted to, 200 years or so from today. Do you think anyone will still be able to open your documents in Adobe InDesign 200 years from now? This may not matter to everyone, but if it matters for your purposes, LaTeX has a clear advantage here. EDIT: I'm not affiliated with the author of this article.
- michaeltwofish 16y ago
  While longevity may be important, I think there are other more interesting advantages of plaintext, namely that I can edit in my editor of choice, I can use a host of existing tools, such as sed, grep, etc, to process it, and it plays well with standard source code management systems.
  - zumda 16y ago
    If you ever wrote a paper with another person, you will absolutely hate Word (and other binary formats). It makes working on the paper a pain, since only one person can work on it at the same time. The ability to split a document in multiple source files and having SVN/git/etc makes it really easy to work on the document at the same time.

scott_s 16y ago

Lyx is a Latex editor with WYSIWIG features: http://www.lyx.org/ http://www.lyx.org/

omaranto 16y ago
Also checkout TeXmacs: http://www.texmacs.org/ http://www.texmacs.org/
stan_rogers 16y ago
To pick a nit, Lyx is WYSIWYM (the M being "mean") -- they point that out a whole bunch of times in the doco.
alok-g 16y ago
A hyperlink is meant to be clickable, and it is not in either Lyx or TeXmacs. In this respect, they both fall short of WYSIWYG/M.

ugh 16y ago

InDesign is an absolutely awesome program, my favorite from Adobe next to Lightroom. Mac OS X’s font palette (while sucky in general and in dire need for a makeover to improve its UI — it’s like vintage 2000 or so) also offers you many of the mentioned features: 1 and 3 are on by default everywhere (type ‘shuffle’ into the Spotlight searchbox, ‘ffl’ will be turned into the appropriate ligature), 2, 4 and 5 are accessible through the palette but I don’t think OS X is clever about line-breaks (at least there are no settings to fine-tune). Don’t know about transparency. It is available to you in every program which uses OS X’s standard method of text input (like Pages or Safari).

alextgordon 16y ago
OS X's text system does have per character transparency. It's not exposed by TextEdit but it is exposed by Pages's color picker. You could retrofit smart justification onto the text system, but it would require some non-trivial code (namely an NSTypesetter subclass). It's not easy, but it's possible.

Niten 16y ago

Another advantage of LaTeX over WYSIWIG alternatives is its simple plaintext representation. If we can still open any documents from our time period in 200 years, we'll be able to open that old LaTeX document of yours, because it's just ASCII (or Unicode in the case of XeLaTeX). And given the portability and simple requirements of the open source, exceptionally well documented TeX code base, it isn't far fetched to imagine someone could even run your documents through the actual LaTeX typesetter, if they really wanted to, 200 years or so from today. Do you think anyone will still be able to open your documents in Adobe InDesign 200 years from now? This may not matter to everyone, but if it matters for your purposes, LaTeX has a clear advantage here. EDIT: I'm not affiliated with the author of this article.

michaeltwofish 16y ago
While longevity may be important, I think there are other more interesting advantages of plaintext, namely that I can edit in my editor of choice, I can use a host of existing tools, such as sed, grep, etc, to process it, and it plays well with standard source code management systems.
- zumda 16y ago
  If you ever wrote a paper with another person, you will absolutely hate Word (and other binary formats). It makes working on the paper a pain, since only one person can work on it at the same time. The ability to split a document in multiple source files and having SVN/git/etc makes it really easy to work on the document at the same time.