4 ms·

LibreOffice attempts to replicate the MS Word "experience", which is good if that's what you looking for, but which I find atrocious. Do you have recommendatio

LibreOffice attempts to replicate the MS Word "experience", which is good if that's what you looking for, but which I find atrocious. Do you have recommendations for a word processor which - Focuses on writing text documents, doesn't attempt to do everything - Is visual, because sometimes it's painful to go through cycle of compilation with LaTeX - Has a minimalistic UI that focuses on semantics; which lets you mark things as sections, titles, emphasis, etc. Fonts, colors, are handled separately within a template editor - Ideally, allows for real-time collaborative editing

w1ntermute 12y ago
> sometimes it's painful to go through cycle of compilation with LaTeX I've found that successful use of LaTeX requires you to avoid compiling on a regular basis. When I write something in LaTeX, I chunk the time I spend on formatting/compiling, so that it doesn't interfere with writing. I also find it helpful to construct multi-file templates that enable modularity and reuse. The only time I really use a GUI is for formatting equations, since being able to see the change right away is very helpful.
- rhinoceraptor 12y ago
  I'm a fan of Gummi (https://github.com/alexandervdm/gummi https://github.com/alexandervdm/gummi) for hand writing LaTeX. It will auto compile your changes, as well as hide the messy intermediate files in the compilation from your directory which I appreciate.
kot-behemoth 12y ago
Have you tried LyX (http://www.lyx.org http://www.lyx.org)? It's a WYSIWYM (your first point) graphical editor for LaTeX and as far as I remember shows you a pretty good preview of your document as you're typing (your second point).
- JTon 12y ago
  Is it just me or are acronyms being dropped on this site growing longer every day? :) "what you see is what you mean" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYM http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYM
- louhike 12y ago
  Relative to LaTeX: Has anyone heard of professional use of LaTeX outside of the scientific fields? I've seen a lot of good examples of the power of LaTeX but all seems ot have been made by scientists. And I tried to convince my girlfriend who is in the edition/layout field (not sure of the correct name). she already knew LaTeX (at my surprise) and she thought the examples were unimpressives. She doesn't anybody in her field using it professionally. So I was wondering if her experience was specific or it was really unused outsite science. Any feedback on this one?
  - dublinben 12y ago
    There's a lot of unprofessional behavior and software practices in the "professional" publishing field. Many authors refuse to write in anything but MS Word, and companies rely on Track Changes for version control of manuscripts.
    - cwyers 12y ago
      Why is that unprofessional?
    - FireBeyond 12y ago
      I'm definitely not an everyday user of Track Changes, but isn't that the very use case for it, version control inside a manuscript? The biggest caveat I've seen to its use are ballooning file sizes (meh), and (more importantly) leaking information. But I also thought recent versions of Word made it more prominent to discard tracking information when doing a Save/As.
  - davidgerard 12y ago
    What real-life scientists do: write their paper in Word then change the font to Computer Modern. (I'm not joking in the slightest.)
  - noamyoungerm 12y ago
    LaTeX is pretty dead outside of science, and it makes sense that this is the state of things. Using LaTeX effectively requires the same ways of thinking needed in order to write code. For people who aren't used to doing this, adjusting from Word to LaTeX is not going to be easy. In the professional publishing fields, editors have overcome the shortcomings of Word in a completely different way - using advanced GUI tools that have hundreds of options and settings that you have to learn, but that let you have instant feedback on your decisions. Admittedly, programs such as InDesign can actually make prettier documents than LaTeX, but the comparative amount of effort you need to invest makes it rather a bad tradeoff for someone who already knows LaTeX. LaTeX is good at making consistently beautiful documents fast, while professional publishing tools let you invest lots of effort into getting something even more beautiful, or downright ugly. For the scientist, LaTeX wins easily, but for someone whose primary job is to make things as pretty as they can be, it is not so.
kstrauser 12y ago
I've switched to using Markdown for almost everything I write. Take your favorite text editor, use a nice preview app (I like Marked 2 for OS X) for tweaking, and enjoy plaintext, grep-able, Git-able, docs that are trivially readable even without a special viewer. That's obviously not an option for everything, but I've used it for everything from internal documentation to slides to blog posts.

w1ntermute 12y ago

> sometimes it's painful to go through cycle of compilation with LaTeX I've found that successful use of LaTeX requires you to avoid compiling on a regular basis. When I write something in LaTeX, I chunk the time I spend on formatting/compiling, so that it doesn't interfere with writing. I also find it helpful to construct multi-file templates that enable modularity and reuse. The only time I really use a GUI is for formatting equations, since being able to see the change right away is very helpful.

rhinoceraptor 12y ago
I'm a fan of Gummi (https://github.com/alexandervdm/gummi https://github.com/alexandervdm/gummi) for hand writing LaTeX. It will auto compile your changes, as well as hide the messy intermediate files in the compilation from your directory which I appreciate.

kot-behemoth 12y ago

Have you tried LyX (http://www.lyx.org http://www.lyx.org)? It's a WYSIWYM (your first point) graphical editor for LaTeX and as far as I remember shows you a pretty good preview of your document as you're typing (your second point).

JTon 12y ago
Is it just me or are acronyms being dropped on this site growing longer every day? :) "what you see is what you mean" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYM http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYM
louhike 12y ago
Relative to LaTeX: Has anyone heard of professional use of LaTeX outside of the scientific fields? I've seen a lot of good examples of the power of LaTeX but all seems ot have been made by scientists. And I tried to convince my girlfriend who is in the edition/layout field (not sure of the correct name). she already knew LaTeX (at my surprise) and she thought the examples were unimpressives. She doesn't anybody in her field using it professionally. So I was wondering if her experience was specific or it was really unused outsite science. Any feedback on this one?
- dublinben 12y ago
  There's a lot of unprofessional behavior and software practices in the "professional" publishing field. Many authors refuse to write in anything but MS Word, and companies rely on Track Changes for version control of manuscripts.
  - cwyers 12y ago
    Why is that unprofessional?
  - FireBeyond 12y ago
    I'm definitely not an everyday user of Track Changes, but isn't that the very use case for it, version control inside a manuscript? The biggest caveat I've seen to its use are ballooning file sizes (meh), and (more importantly) leaking information. But I also thought recent versions of Word made it more prominent to discard tracking information when doing a Save/As.
- davidgerard 12y ago
  What real-life scientists do: write their paper in Word then change the font to Computer Modern. (I'm not joking in the slightest.)
- noamyoungerm 12y ago
  LaTeX is pretty dead outside of science, and it makes sense that this is the state of things. Using LaTeX effectively requires the same ways of thinking needed in order to write code. For people who aren't used to doing this, adjusting from Word to LaTeX is not going to be easy. In the professional publishing fields, editors have overcome the shortcomings of Word in a completely different way - using advanced GUI tools that have hundreds of options and settings that you have to learn, but that let you have instant feedback on your decisions. Admittedly, programs such as InDesign can actually make prettier documents than LaTeX, but the comparative amount of effort you need to invest makes it rather a bad tradeoff for someone who already knows LaTeX. LaTeX is good at making consistently beautiful documents fast, while professional publishing tools let you invest lots of effort into getting something even more beautiful, or downright ugly. For the scientist, LaTeX wins easily, but for someone whose primary job is to make things as pretty as they can be, it is not so.

kstrauser 12y ago

I've switched to using Markdown for almost everything I write. Take your favorite text editor, use a nice preview app (I like Marked 2 for OS X) for tweaking, and enjoy plaintext, grep-able, Git-able, docs that are trivially readable even without a special viewer. That's obviously not an option for everything, but I've used it for everything from internal documentation to slides to blog posts.