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Ask HN: MS Word alternatives for writing academic reports

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Re: Ask HN: MS Word alternatives for writing academic reports

#31

Post by Paul_S »

partoutok wrote: post #15
Paul_S wrote: post #12

Have 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.

LyX is not WYSIWYG and I'm not sure how to argue this point. What you see in the editor window doesn't look like the paginated output - it's not really up to someone's opinion to decide.

Re: Ask HN: MS Word alternatives for writing academic reports

#32

Post by AnimalMuppet »

Lyx. Full stop.

I've used it for two papers for arXiv, with equations and tables. It can write any math formula you can write on paper. You don't need to learn Latex at all to use it. It's very clear and intuitive. It's not WYSIWIG, but it's clear what you're going to get, and what you need to do on-screen to get what you want.

And,if you're on Linux, you should be able to get it running with no sweat.

Re: Ask HN: MS Word alternatives for writing academic reports

#33

Post by partoutok »

Paul_S wrote: post #31
partoutok wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

LyX is not WYSIWYG and I'm not sure how to argue this point. What you see in the editor window doesn't look like the paginated output - it's not really up to someone's opinion to decide.

It's not the paginated output but it's close, especially compared to LaTeX code. And I believe many people understand WYSIWYG broadly as a point and click interface with visual feedback, in contrast to writing some code.

Re: Ask HN: MS Word alternatives for writing academic reports

#34

Post by pseingatl »

indralukmana wrote: post #5
pseingatl wrote: post #3

1. Draft in Scrivener. 2. Export to rtf. 3. Open the file in Open Office. 4. Export to LaTex. 5. Typeset pdf. You can also export directly from Scrivener to LaTex, but a thesis is going to require a good deal of back and forth and revisions before it is ready for typesetting. If you don't want to have a typeset final product, you can write in Scrivener and export to many different formats. If you want to write using…

it looks like a very nice application, but i forgot to mention that i am now mainly using linux and it seems there is no linux version? (and also free (as in free lunch version) :D)

There is a linux version, it's available here:

http://literatureandlatte.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=252...

Re: Ask HN: MS Word alternatives for writing academic reports

#36

Post by csense »

Markdown and RST is what people generally use for documentation and blog writing.

However, LaTeX has features designed for academic writing (e.g. you can have references to sections / bibliography entries, so when you insert or delete new ones, the numbers in the text are updated automatically.)

You don't mention what subject your thesis is in, but if it involves mathematical notation, you will likely have a lot more work and poorer results if you use anything but LaTeX.

Specifically related to the question of using LaTeX's mathematical typesetting capabilities in documentation or webpages, MathJax [1] is a popular solution. The Python-based static blog generator Nikola [2] has support for MathJax.

As for being intimidated by LaTeX, and being too unfamiliar with alternatives to make a comparison, I suggest spending a day or so trying to write a small part of your report in LaTeX, then deciding after you've used it.

[1] http://www.mathjax.org/

[2] http://getnikola.com/

Re: Ask HN: MS Word alternatives for writing academic reports

#37

Post by shushcat »

As other commenters have mentioned, Pandoc[1] is an incredibly useful tool for converting documents between formats. I do not, however, think that its usefulness in a solution to your specific problem has been framed clearly enough. It uses a version of the markdown syntax which is slightly-modified to ease writing of lengthier or academic documents. For example, a citation to a BibTeX bibiliography (usually performed in LaTeX by typing `\cite{McElroy-2000}`) is written `@McElroy-2000`, headers can be tagged to simplify internal references, and actual LaTeX commands can be called if you need them. Since the changes from standard markdown are minimal, you can write using any of the many markdown editors which are available.

As to my particular setup, I write Pandoc markdown in Vim using a plugin which I wrote for that purpose.[2] Nothing fancy, mind you, just light syntax highlighting, some keyboard shortcuts for (1) exporting to html or pdf (via-LaTeX) and (2) jumping between headers, and document folding, the latter of which is especially useful for outlining and organizing lengthy documents.

[1]: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/

[2]: https://github.com/shushcat/minimd

Re: Ask HN: MS Word alternatives for writing academic reports

#38

Post by indralukmana »

Thank you everyone for the suggestions and insights. After contemplating with the choices i have decided to go through with restructuredtext, and pickup latex bit-by-bit to incorporate scientific parts (it turns out you can do some inline latex in restructuredtext).

here are some factors that drive my decision:

- i can start writing content right away without much initial learning

- rst can be read/revised by my other peers with more ease than full blown latex document.

- i can use latex parts (equations, typesetting, etc) inline with rst, and i can learn latex bit-by-bit on the way

- there some libraries/program that can make attractive presentations using rst (http://regebro.github.io/hovercraft/#/step-1)

so i will use rst and learn latex on the way.

Re: Ask HN: MS Word alternatives for writing academic reports

#39

Post by atsaloli »

Check out asciidoc, it is quite mature. You can start using it quickly, but it's very full-featured and has a supportive community. Can generate text, HTML, Docbook XML, PDF output. Generates nice looking output, customizable, etc.

It's like markdown but more mature and scales to large documents.

http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/

Re: Ask HN: MS Word alternatives for writing academic reports

#40

Post by pseingatl »

jimhefferon wrote: post #8
pseingatl wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LaTex is not a writing application, it is a typesetting application. LaTex should be your last stop before publication. You can, of course, write natively in LaTex but the program wasn't designed for that.

> You can, of course, write natively in LaTex but the program wasn't designed for that. Hard to know precisely what you mean by this, but if you mean that you shouldn't be writing things like \documentclass{article} \begin{document} Hello world. \end{document} then you are mistaken; the LaTeX book (and many other documents) describes what to do. If what you mean is that a person is somehow meant to use a front end su…

What I mean is that in your example the only content is "Hello world." The rest is typesetting. The original question asked, "what tool should I use to write?" LaTex answers the question, "how can I typeset what I have written?" BTW, Lyx is a terrific program. My only complaint with it is that I haven't found a way to mimic a word processor's tab behavior consistently. The tabbing package doesn't do it for me. \qquad does, kind of, but that's six keystrokes. The problem is that in some kinds of writing text placement may have meaning and this conflicts with LaTex's underlying paradigm of automating typesetting decisions.
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