The article author should have tried LyX [1]. It's a graphical editor but still uses LaTeX to produce the output. (Its main downside is that its LaTeX import fu

The article author should have tried LyX [1]. It's a graphical editor but still uses LaTeX to produce the output. (Its main downside is that its LaTeX import functionality is very patchy.) It has support for a large common set of LaTeX functionality, and there are a few ways to extend it e.g. user macros and modules. If all else fails you can directly insert raw LaTeX in your document; obviously this defeats the point so is best avoided where possible, but it shows that it can ultimately do everything LaTeX can. The graphical representation shown on screen is somewhat approximate e.g. fonts and sizes are approximate, and line wrapping is totally unrelated to the final output. But it's good enough to understand what's what, and most importantly it's free of all the markup clutter, and that's what the author objects to. It's especially good at this for equations, but it makes a different even just for regular text. Plus it has autocomplete for LaTeX commands (I realise that there are LaTeX editors that do this too). A lot of people mistake LyX as being a beginner's tool to avoid understanding LaTeX. I would say it is almost exactly the opposite: you still need to understand LaTeX to use LyX effectively. Rather than the markup being right in front of you it's hidden by a layer of indirection, which of course is the whole point, but it makes it harder to understand what's going on when something breaks. It breaks less often (e.g. you never get mismatched close braces) but the hard errors still crop up (e.g. incompatible packages giving really obscure errors about macro expansions). I've written numerous mathematical documents of various lengths in LyX, and prior to that a few documents in LaTeX including my MSc thesis. When I first discovered LyX I was partway through writing up notes from a lecture course I was attending. In LaTeX it took me about three hours to write up notes for each hour lecture; in LyX it took me one hour per hour of lecture. A factor of three speed improvement! I can hardly imagine how long my PhD thesis would've taken without it. [1] http://www.lyx.org/ http://www.lyx.org/