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I don't need formula and all the other reasons for using latex are no longer that relevant.

Word processors are not appropriate for large documents that need consistent formatting. They're not desktop publishing applications. Aside from a more "pretty" output with less work, LaTeX also ensures lots of consistency across your document without having to think about it... whereas Word tricks you into thinking you've done something right with the WYSIWYG environment... until you accidentally do something that messes up the formatting.

Also don't want to spend time learning what is essentially a new language with often cryptic build tools so I can write a document.

One word -- LyX.

It's basically a GUI word processor of sorts, with LaTeX under the hood. Click a button to get a PDF.

Yes, if you need really specialized custom formatting or unusual features, you may need to dig around a bit to figure out how to do them. But the good news is once you solve a problem in LaTeX (and LyX), your solution usually "sticks." Solve a problem in MS Word with layout, and change some other random feature in your document, and suddenly your custom formatting screws up in all sorts of unpredictable ways. That's because MS Word is NOT a desktop publishing tool. If you want proper handling of large documents with consistent formatting, etc., you want to use something appropriate -- either LaTeX or something commercial like InDesign.

With LyX, you won't have the learning curve for LaTeX in pure text form. Mostly you just choose a document class appropriate to your task, select a few options from it to customize your formatting, and you're good to go. Even use a non-TeX font with built-in XeTeX/LuaTeX support. I'm not going to oversell this, though -- you will probably spend a couple days setting up a custom document preamble to get everything exactly the way you want it (if you care about typography... but if you care about typography, you wouldn't be using Word or any normal word processor).

But if you don't care about typography so much, you just need to conform your thesis to your university's requirements. Some schools actually have LaTeX templates available for use (officially or unofficially)... but if not, you may need to do some customizations. Luckily, you can often just ask in a TeX forum somewhere (e.g., on StackExchange) and people will frequently just give you the appropriate commands to include if you ask your question clearly.

As someone who went through the process of writing a thesis and also helped a couple others deal with last-minute formatting problems in MS Word, let me just say: you're going to spend at least a few days dealing with formatting issues no matter what. If you go with MS Word, unless you're a wizard who knows all the possible places Word will screw things up, you're going to spend several days at the end dealing with headaches where the text just doesn't flow properly or that figure/table/image/whatever simply disappears or completely ruins the formatting for an entire chapter for no apparent reason.

LyX isn't a perfect solution, since ideally you need to be familiar with the underlying LaTeX code to fix the few things that do go wrong. But if you're just doing one document like this, you can likely get the support you need on a forum. Chances are many of the questions you may have are already answered for you out there.

"LyX is for people who want their writing to look great, right out of the box. No more endless tinkering with formatting details, “finger painting” font attributes or futzing around with page boundaries." ref

LibreOffice - latest version, not the old one from your distro
http://www.libreoffice.org/ (install with dpkg -i *.deb)

Dia https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Dia (poor mans visio)
Lyx http://www.lyx.org/ (easy latex editor) with modern-cv to keep my CV up to date
Metasploit, Nessus, ettercap, wireshark, nmap, etc. just for fun

Avidemux, ffmpeg and VLC media player for everything related to video and audio
Gimp and Blender (latest version) for photo editing and 3D-stuff

In fact, I started using LyX back in... 1997 or so?

Not only it is used and looks like a WYSIWYG editor, but actually frees your mind from actually caring how it will render on a page of a given size. Just write what you mean (they call it WYSIWYM — M for Mean), and when previewed/printed it will be beautiful. Why? Because it is LaTeX doing it.

Personally, I've found more fugly code turds in various closed source projects than I've touched than in the open source world.

Is code the only aspect of note in an open source project?

How is the project named? Is it something reminiscent of the function (like PaintShop Pro, Photoshop, Internet Explorer) or something entirely random, forcing more cognitive load on an uninformed user (Gimp, Firefox, Juice)? Does it have a newish, edgy name to give it that extra sizzle (pantyshot, upskirt).

How is the project configured? Is is a list of poorly-written technobabble? Does the installation instructions begin with the history of the project (of which I am not interested), require other packages which I have to research and choose, does it require cryptic installation actions and complex setup that has to be done by hand?

How does the project look? Are the panels laid out with ease-of-use in mind, or they just show everything and "let the user arrange them as they like"? Is the text font and color scheme appropriate, or is it default, the user can choose the one they like?

Are there lots of icons for every little action, no matter how small (the "kitchen sink" philosophy), or is there a well-chosen subset that balances functionality with ease-of-use? Do the icon shapes bring the function to mind, or are they more-or-less random shapes that rely on popups to tell the user what they do?

Is the documentation well-written by people who are good at explaining things, or is it just a wiki editable by anyone, maintained by the users, with no real structure?

Has the code been tested by someone who is not the lead coder (and not the users)? Does the project use regression tests?

Yeah, nice code you've got there. If that's all I wanted in a product, yours would be a slam dunk.

It's called Lyx - http://www.lyx.org/

Real-time processing speed is still a concern. Even with *way* more computing power than available decades ago, it still takes a noticeably nonzero amount of time to render a several page LaTeX document. For live document editing, or even re-flowing a webpage when your window size changes, you need a much faster (and consequently cruder-looking) layout algorithm. Now, most document preparation would be much better served by a model like LyX: fast approximate on-screen rendering for editing, with a slow "final polished form" output. However, this means you lose WYSIWYG control over the final output; for the (much rarer than most people seem to think) cases where you actually want this, you're stuck trading off layout quality for computer speed.

You could try the LyX the document processor



Self-publishing with LYX

You could use LyX instead and get a nice WYSIWYMean editor.

Yes, it's called Lyx
http://www.lyx.org/

LaTeX is the technology, but LyX is the document processor (not word processor) that you want.

I've made the switch from OpenOffice/LibreOffice to LyX and haven't looked back!

For what it's worth, I work in academia and often have to create documents with complex bibliographies. I use JabRef to manage my bibliographic database, and it integrates so smoothly with LyX. My colleagues who are stuck with MS Word+Endnote are green with envy when they see my professional quality printouts.

But the real benefit is pleasure of the WYSIWYM (what you see if what you mean) paradigm. When you're actually doing work, you want to think in terms of content, not in terms of how the printout will appear. LyX is just so perfect in this respect: I get to define the screen fonts that are comfortable for me as I work, while relying on LaTeX's power to make things render nicely in the end.

Another vote for Beamer. The only gripe that I have is that you have to Google basically every formatting change you want - getting rid of the navigation toolbar, changing the bullet style, etc. This is not unlike everything else in Latex, but the options can get fairly obscure so it can be a slightly bigger hassle. Also, if you're writing raw latex yourself, inserting columns can be unwieldy, but I haven't made a presentation since I started using vim-latex, and I imagine that would make things a lot easier.

On the other hand, the themes are remarkably elegant and documents are very professional. When I used Beamer in school, people consistently told me that my slides looked more professional and readable than anyone else's. Also, the transitions are easy to make and the formula editing is obviously the best out there.

Here are some more suggestions, including Powerdot which is a good alternative to Beamer as well (slightly less complex perhaps): http://wiki.lyx.org/LyX/Presentations

LyX:

http://www.lyx.org/

should address such awkwardness.

If you want to write a book, consider using Lyx (Link: http://www.lyx.org/Features) instead of Word 2010. It keeps track of all indexes, links, references, footnotes and TOCs, produces PDF output with links to everything you desire to cross-reference, and gives you a printed output much better than any version of Word. Give it a try!

You should try Asciidoc or docbook directly. I don't know if LaTeX has enough information to be faithfully converted to epub. But Asciidoc can reuse the LaTeX notations for a number of things.

I think it's the questions of right tool for the job, docbook is very widely used and is designed for working with books, and asciidoc and simular tools are for the non masochistic of us that prefer to edit text files and not raw xml. If you like gui there are plenty of guies for docbook, including LyX.

The GIMP is a bit dodgy, yes; OpenOffice looks terrible, but DON'T use Word. (La)TeX is unbelievably better, and if you want a GUI, LyX is great. These are programs that are used professionally, and are orders of magnitude better than the ugly junk that is Microsoft Word. http://www.latex-project.org/ http://www.lyx.org/

http://www.lyx.org/

A ``What You See is What You Mean'' document editor which uses LaTeX to typeset final output, it has a lot of other options and a nice, sensible, straight-forward interface which is everything Word's Ribbon is not.

William

I thought serious students used http://www.lyx.org/?

I do most of my writing in proportional fonts. I use two spaces after periods at the end of sentences. It just looks better, Except where the word processor (usually MS Word) stretches words too far apart (MS never heard of letter spacing?) in full justification, then I'll go back and change it to a single space.

Such tweaking will always cause problems in the long run, especially in longer documents. May I instead recommend using LyX, a text editor which uses LaTeX as the underlying typesetting engine (but in which knowledge of LaTeX is not required). It won't let you type two consecutive spaces, but in the output it will insert a longer space between sentences.

After all, shouldn't it be the job of the typesetting program to do the typesetting, and not the author of the text? I mean, you don't do hyphenation manually, why would you do the same with spacing? I only use double spaces in plain text files, and don't try to manually correct any of the more sophisticated editors.

Instead of "LaTeX light", you could just try using LyX to write your paper. It is no harder to use than Word, and contains the full power of TeX.

http://www.lyx.org/

Viewing figures/graphs is a pain, if you add a new figure you have to "compile" the latex, call up the ps viewer, then scroll to the figure to see if it looks right, not to mention figure out where LaTeX decided to place them.

As others have pointed out, you should have tried LyX. It does all the 'compiling' for you at the push of a button.

All 27 users of TeX will be quite excited about this.

Ah yes, the reliable old joke: all X people who care will be happy, where X is a humorously small number. Classic!

But kidding aside, TeX is in heavy use. Most TeX users use LaTeX or even LyX to wrap TeX and make it easier, but TeX is in there doing the work.

My understanding is that TeX is standard in the academic world, because it can correctly typeset serious math equations. Also, Wikipedia uses TeX to process all <math> tags (see here for details).

I have many times read discussion boards where people said something like "I started writing my thesis in Microsoft Word using its equation editor. After my fourth bout of heavy drinking and depression, my friend showed me LaTeX, and I was able to finish my thesis with just a few wine coolers and hardly any Prozac."

steveha

It's a hoax, but it it's a shame that something isn't being to speed up development on the successor to LaTeX2. LaTeX 3 development work has been underway since the early 1990s. One feature I'd like to see implemented is a reliable way of inserting an inline text box that the main text wraps around, for tip boxes. There is some third party support for images that take up less than a full column width, and it can be hijacked for text, but it doesn't work reliably. Basically, what I think will happen is that TeX will die out to be replaced by DTP due to the stalled development process. A shame, as a lot of us liked it, particular when teamed up with LyX.

[...] TeX itself is low-level, and when you use a package like LaTeX it becomes far more user-friendly.

Let's not forget the glory that is the LyX editor:

LyX is a document processor that encourages an approach to writing based on the structure of your documents (WYSIWYM) and not simply their appearance (WYSIWYG).

LyX is delightful for those who want a nice cross-plaform GUI editor, structure in their documents, as well as strong control over presentation, but want structure rather than presentation foremost in their everyday editing experience.

I'm a developer ... I'm looking into something more formal like a research paper.

LaTeX. Here's a template (you wanted article.ltx). Some distributions of LaTeX come with templates as well. Here's a quick guide (PDF).

LyX is the best TeX document processor I've used. This is the 21st century, no need to program and compile your technical documents from the command line using vi and multiple compile steps.

Almost without exception, WYSIWYG editors suck. I only say 'almost' because I'm willing to admit that in some parallel universe, some Leonardo of the keyboard might conceivably have invented a WYSIWYG word processor that actually does an adequate job at non-trivial tasks.

I seem to remember that LyX, a graphical editor for LaTeX documents, popularized What You See Is What You Mean in word processing. Except I don't see any contributor named Leonard.

Plus there is STILL no good method for entering equations on computers

I recommend LyX, a front-end to latex. When I was in college I was able to take equation-heavy notes real-time in class. My notes usually looked much better than the professor's official class notes as well. LyX does have a learning curve, but you can always remap the keys to whatever you are used to.

Well, I teach an undergraduate course and avoid using presentation software -which, anyway, would have been Lyx plus Beamer for me-, for largely the kind of reasons advanced in TFA. Most of my colleagues use PowerPoint or something similar this days.

And I'm starting to notice that many students actually prefer the PP-teachers. They want to have the information delivered in formulaic pills, "Concept A stands for blah; Concept B stands for bleh", and this is more easily achieved if the formulae in question are neatly projected on the screen. I could achieve the same effect by dictating, of course, but that's even more boring and less empowering for students that PowerPoint.

I had some trouble with this, so I wrote a script called lyxpp.py to allow me to specify a precise preamble. See: http://www.lyx.org/trac/ticket/5031

I strongly second LyX. I used it for years in college to take equation-heavy class notes and to do my homework. Often times my class notes came out better looking than the professor's. LyX was also very light on CPU use. Using LyX I was able to transcribe tables, matrices, integrals, fractions, really anything the professor threw on the board, in near real-time.

I don't know if it is up to the speed you need, but the equation editor in LyX is pretty darn cool.

http://www.lyx.org/

steveha

LyX

With some practice (and appropriate shortcuts), you can enter formulas faster than you can write them down with a pen.

LyX could loosely be called a LaTeX editor and can be sanely called simple and/or easy to use.

Lyx has been reasonably nice to me.

LyX is a graphical "document processor" that uses LaTeX as its file format, supposedly first released in 1999.

RTF also uses text-based markup.

LyX is a document processor that encourages an approach to writing based on the structure of your documents (WYSIWYM) and not simply their appearance (WYSIWYG).

LyX combines the power and flexibility of TeX/LaTeX with the ease of use of a graphical interface. This results in world-class support for creation of mathematical content (via a fully integrated equation editor) and structured documents like academic articles, theses, and books. In addition, staples of scientific authoring such as reference list and index creation come standard. But you can also use LyX to create a letter or a novel or a theatre play or film script. A broad array of ready, well-designed document layouts are built in.

LyX is for people who want their writing to look great, right out of the box. No more endless tinkering with formatting details, âoefinger paintingâ font attributes or futzing around with page boundaries. You just write. On screen, LyX looks like any word processor; its printed output â" or richly cross-referenced PDF, just as readily produced â" looks like nothing else.

MS Word is a Jack-of-all-Trades that does everything poorly. You can bend over backwards to work with it, and if you don't know anything else you'll feel like a superuser. It doesn't have to be that way, though.

I realize you probably have no choice in the matter, but have you tried LyX for writing documentation? It's a structured document editor - basically, a graphical interface for TeX/LaTeX. To be honest, I've only used it a few times (documentation is an afterthought where I work), but I've been very impressed with the results. Of course, as a web developer, I prefer thinking in terms of structure (HTML) vs. presentation (CSS), so LyX is a natural fit. Check the features page for a better overview than I can give you.

I realize you probably have no choice in the matter, but have you tried LyX for writing documentation? It's a structured document editor - basically, a graphical interface for TeX/LaTeX. To be honest, I've only used it a few times (documentation is an afterthought where I work), but I've been very impressed with the results. Of course, as a web developer, I prefer thinking in terms of structure (HTML) vs. presentation (CSS), so LyX is a natural fit. Check the features page for a better overview than I can give you.

LyX. I wrote a thesis in it and didn't have to resort to any manual interventions in the generated LaTeX. Couple it with SVG diagrams, generated by inkscape, and you have a seamless authoring system that handles both text and graphics. SVG means there is no messy task of keeping source and postscript output synchronised (just right click a diagram within LyX to edit the SVG source with inkscape). Use gnuplot to generate your (postscript) graphs and you have pretty well a complete authoring system. A few years ago, LyX and inkscape were too immature to use seriously, but they have matured. I recommend the combination.

LyX. I wrote a thesis in it and didn't have to resort to any manual interventions in the generated LaTeX. Couple it with SVG diagrams, generated by inkscape, and you have a seamless authoring system that handles both text and graphics. SVG means there is no messy task of keeping source and postscript output synchronised (just right click a diagram within LyX to edit the SVG source with inkscape). Use gnuplot to generate your (postscript) graphs and you have pretty well a complete authoring system. A few years ago, LyX and inkscape were too immature to use seriously, but they have matured. I recommend the combination.

Does LaTeX have a 'hide codes' option?

Yes, for sure, give LyX a try.

I'm truly looking forward to LyX 2.0 when it arrives soon. 1.6.3 is already solid, but 2.0 with XeTeX should really help it go far in expanding it's adoption. Kile 2.1 is almost here, then there is already TeXShop, TeXMaker and now TeXWorks to leverage.

Does LaTeX have a 'hide codes' option?

Yes, for sure, give LyX a try.

For the really lazy, there's always LyX.

Try LyX. Its a GUI for Latex, you basically write out what you want in your document, and then just select styles from a menu based on the class you have chosen for your document. Its amazingly similar to how Word 2007 operates if you use the style system, but it produces far superior output, and you don't have to spend hours mucking around with styles to get your document looking good. It won't show you the final output on the screen, you have to render a pdf or something to see it, but that is good. The amount of time wasted on formatting in word is ridiculous.

Why not use texmaker, LED or even Lyx?

How well does OpenOffice.org do this?

OpenOffice doesn't do TeX-style markup, since the sole reason for OpenOffice existing is to feel familiar for users of Microsoft Office (pre 2007), and since Word doesn't do it (yet) then neither can OOo.

If you don't care about Microsoft Office then you're free to use anything. I use LyX ( http://www.lyx.org/ ), a GUI word processor which outputs to TeX, when I'm doing large projects or anything scientific. I use Abiword ( http://www.abisource.com/ ) for creating quick throwaway documents, and I use leafpad (GUI, http://tarot.freeshell.org/leafpad ) and Nano (commandline, http://www.nano-editor.org/ ) for writing down anything that doesn't need any formatting.

For easy-to-use, LyX is the best front-end for LaTeX:

http://www.lyx.org/

IMO it's one of the most innovative of software projects, commercial or otherwise.

William

I've never managed to get Word's autonumbering to work correctly in a continuously edited technical document despite many attempts to reset / modify the Heading X styles. The auto-formatting feature in MS Word is the worst culprit. This has always been MS Word's problem from the beginning (I'm currently using Office 2003 out of necessity).

I've never tried Office 2007, didn't want to invest any more energy on learning an incompatible interface on an application that does not deal well with technical documents.

LyX (LaTeX) is great for stuff like auto-numbering, but diagrams are a pain since there's no easy way to edit the diagram by double clicking on it, besides the lack of good diagramming tools that export to EPS format. Visio generates lousy EPS (deliberately?)

FrameMaker was the best of the lot. Unfortunately its market share and numerous bugs during the time Adobe bought it over meant that it's no longer a real contender for most people.

SVN would be nicer because it's got the ability to branch/merge.

SVN is supported.

This isn't a news item at all; the solution as suggested by the Ask Slashdot questioner:

The closest I can approximate would be to have something like Lyx (to hide the learning curve of LaTeX) with integrated svn (to hide the learning curve of svn)"

already exists. As detailed in the release notes to LyX 1.6, LyX supports SVN version control already.