4 ms·

Your workflow is very in-line with the author's recommendations though. His idea is to use something like pandoc to convert word-processor or markdown writing i

by exergy 8y ago

Your workflow is very in-line with the author's recommendations though. His idea is to use something like pandoc to convert word-processor or markdown writing into latex, and then letting latex do what it's actually good at: Typesetting.

wirrbel 8y ago
I am pretty sure the author of that blog post has not done so. Everytime I used pandoc or similar tools to convert text from one format into another, I had to put in a lot of effort to manually fix up things. Its not realistic for most cases. To-latex conversions are actually among the more developed paths, and all instances I can think of (pandoc, sphinx, dblatex) produce kind-of-weird output. If you cannot stand latex but want to produce print-quality PDFs, Apache FOP (with Docbook) probably is your best bet. Otherwise your kind of bound to introduce a heavily manual processing step between writing and formatting for print.
- fiddlerwoaroof 8y ago
  I wrote 3 years of papers in LaTeX (ancient philosophy, so minimal math). I generally did markdown>pandoc>xelatex. I never really had to touch up the final output (except for a single script I made that removed some incorrect line breaks): I would just use inline LaTeX as needed to get things like figures into the output.
  - newen 8y ago
    I wrote my thesis (200 pages) in LaTeX and I cannot imagine not having to do the final touch ups in LaTeX. You tend to get lots of line break issues, figure location and orientation and spacing issues, vertical spacing issues, that you have to touch up to make it look nice. It sounds incredibly impractical to do your writing in markdown and then use pandoc to convert to LaTeX, do dozens of touch ups, and then get your final output, send to your reviewers, get your reviews and recommended edits, do more edits (okay, now I can't go back to markdown anymore and redo the whole conversion process), more touch ups, rinse and repeat a few dozen times with your reviewers. Might as well stick with LaTeX in the first place.
qwerty456127 8y ago
That's a pity there is no visual word processor designed right for this. In my vision of a perfect word processor it should only manage the outline conveniently and let you write the content but have no features that let people use it the wrong way: no way to directly set font of individual elements (only let you mark them as headings, quotes, emphasized spans etc) etc. Of course I can do this by writing HTML or Markdown manually but there still are many people who won't (some because it seems unnecessary hackery to them, some because they actually lack mental capacity to get it) and even me I would appreciate a tool that could make it this more comfortable. I have described idea of a perfect writing tool here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18858538 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18858538

by exergy 8y ago

wirrbel 8y ago

I am pretty sure the author of that blog post has not done so. Everytime I used pandoc or similar tools to convert text from one format into another, I had to put in a lot of effort to manually fix up things. Its not realistic for most cases. To-latex conversions are actually among the more developed paths, and all instances I can think of (pandoc, sphinx, dblatex) produce kind-of-weird output. If you cannot stand latex but want to produce print-quality PDFs, Apache FOP (with Docbook) probably is your best bet. Otherwise your kind of bound to introduce a heavily manual processing step between writing and formatting for print.

fiddlerwoaroof 8y ago
I wrote 3 years of papers in LaTeX (ancient philosophy, so minimal math). I generally did markdown>pandoc>xelatex. I never really had to touch up the final output (except for a single script I made that removed some incorrect line breaks): I would just use inline LaTeX as needed to get things like figures into the output.
- newen 8y ago
  I wrote my thesis (200 pages) in LaTeX and I cannot imagine not having to do the final touch ups in LaTeX. You tend to get lots of line break issues, figure location and orientation and spacing issues, vertical spacing issues, that you have to touch up to make it look nice. It sounds incredibly impractical to do your writing in markdown and then use pandoc to convert to LaTeX, do dozens of touch ups, and then get your final output, send to your reviewers, get your reviews and recommended edits, do more edits (okay, now I can't go back to markdown anymore and redo the whole conversion process), more touch ups, rinse and repeat a few dozen times with your reviewers. Might as well stick with LaTeX in the first place.

qwerty456127 8y ago

That's a pity there is no visual word processor designed right for this. In my vision of a perfect word processor it should only manage the outline conveniently and let you write the content but have no features that let people use it the wrong way: no way to directly set font of individual elements (only let you mark them as headings, quotes, emphasized spans etc) etc. Of course I can do this by writing HTML or Markdown manually but there still are many people who won't (some because it seems unnecessary hackery to them, some because they actually lack mental capacity to get it) and even me I would appreciate a tool that could make it this more comfortable. I have described idea of a perfect writing tool here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18858538 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18858538