> LaTeX conversion usually requires three different tools That's what shell scripts are for. It is trivial to write a script that will accept a LaTeX filename

> LaTeX conversion usually requires three different tools That's what shell scripts are for. It is trivial to write a script that will accept a LaTeX filename and run the necessary commands on it. It is only a little bit more work to add in hooks (e.g., to your IDE) such that the script is run automatically upon saving the file. Moreover, with .tex files being plain-text, you could even write simple scripts to assist with updating the documents themselves. Something like "add-new-reference" or "update-hobbies" could accept input from the user and add it to the .tex file quite trivially. This is in contrast to a GUI program, where you are basically forced to fire up a heavyweight editor, perform the changes by hand, and then perform each export one-by-one, also by hand. I know you could script old versions of OpenOffice using Java or Python, but that ends up being way more convoluted than doing the equivalent with a .tex file.