Lyx is a good option for a sort of WYSIWYG LaTeX (http://www.lyx.org/)
Ask HN: MS Word alternatives for writing academic reports
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Re: Ask HN: MS Word alternatives for writing academic reports
#12Have you considered LyX? Designed for people with a problem like yours - wanting the benefit of TeX output without the effort needed to learn something new. It's also a pretty good structure oriented (rather than WYSIWYG) editor.
Re: Ask HN: MS Word alternatives for writing academic reports
#13The first thing you need to know about is http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/ which is a fantastic tool. So I would say that it might be worth reconsidering LaTeX because it has http://www.bibtex.org/ which is excellent for academic papers. The investment to get competent with LaTeX is certainly several hours, but it pays itself back quickly. See http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX for a good learning resource. For myse…
thank you very much for the recommendations,
>>I used Markdown to write the bulk of my text for a while, but I found it didn't scale very well to large documents. It is great for blog posts and the like.
what do you use for large documents? does it have references /bibliography supports?
Re: Ask HN: MS Word alternatives for writing academic reports
#14Lyx is a good option for a sort of WYSIWYG LaTeX ( http://www.lyx.org/ )
thank you, i will look into it
Re: Ask HN: MS Word alternatives for writing academic reports
#15Have you considered LyX? Designed for people with a problem like yours - wanting the benefit of TeX output without the effort needed to learn something new. It's also a pretty good structure oriented (rather than WYSIWYG) editor.
Isn't LyX WYSIWYG ?
Personally I would say it is. (and also @vancomycin below).
Sure there is also the "WYSIWYM" category, but it's more of a pun and not broadly known.
Re: Ask HN: MS Word alternatives for writing academic reports
#16Maybe https://www.writelatex.com/ can help you become familiar with LaTeX? I'm not huge into type-setting myself but there are numerous text editors and markup formats that can export to LaTeX. The bonus is that you can script most of the workflow and cargo-cult what you need to get the document working until you properly figure things out.
Re: Ask HN: MS Word alternatives for writing academic reports
#17You may not want to use the same tools to write academic reports and blog posts. It's best explained by the popular programming quote that "when you have a hammer, you see every problem as a nail."
LaTeX can get hard, but templates lower the learning curve. Google "latex report templates," learn how to compile them, play with them. Even if it's harder the first day, it will be a lot more useful in the long term.
The learning curve is not a fair excuse not to try it. If you try it, build things with it, and don't like it, you'll know what you're not missing.
Re: Ask HN: MS Word alternatives for writing academic reports
#18I recommend latex, as once you get going it is not really all that complex, what with all the packages available.
i am considering learning latex, but it looks like it has a steep learning curve compared with markup language like rst or markdown and also it seems very verbose i.e, presentation and content are written whole/completely
Not at all; LaTeX is a wrapper over TeX made exactly to hide all formatting routines behind structural declarations like \section, \itemize or \emph. To this end it is not really different from Markdown; yes, tokens require slightly more keystrokes, but you get something way more powerful and predictive -- Markdown won't give you nested enumerations, tables, references, footnotes, automatic TOCs or figure lists... Niether BibTeX which will happily eat your Mendeley of Zotero library and compile a perfect bibliography, includes that allow you to split your work into several files or macros that can save you from re-typing certain things over and over.
Re: Ask HN: MS Word alternatives for writing academic reports
#19Maybe https://www.writelatex.com/ can help you become familiar with LaTeX? I'm not huge into type-setting myself but there are numerous text editors and markup formats that can export to LaTeX. The bonus is that you can script most of the workflow and cargo-cult what you need to get the document working until you properly figure things out.
I'm a cofounder at wL. If you're new to LaTeX, you might want to check out our online course [1], and we also have a 'rich text' mode that renders equations and some commands inline in the editor, for quicker feedback [2].
[1] https://www.writelatex.com/blog/7-free-online-introduction-t...
Re: Ask HN: MS Word alternatives for writing academic reports
#20The first thing you need to know about is http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/ which is a fantastic tool. So I would say that it might be worth reconsidering LaTeX because it has http://www.bibtex.org/ which is excellent for academic papers. The investment to get competent with LaTeX is certainly several hours, but it pays itself back quickly. See http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX for a good learning resource. For myse…
MultiMarkdown might be more suitable for large documents, as it allows the inclusion of files between documents, cross-references etc.