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Modern LaTeX Replacement?
javierzinho writes "For many years I have been using LaTeX to compose scientific documents, but truly I am getting tired of its complexity. You have to install new packages for new features, compatibility issues are everywhere, you need to know commands for everything, table composition is torture, image insertion is an odyssey if you don't have the 'right' format, and you need to be a LaTeX Jedi master to create a new document class. I'm looking for a document processor (not a word processor) that is a viable replacement for LaTeX, possessing all of its advantages — consistency between text and math text, automated cross references, direct PDF creation, etc. — but that is not stuck in the 1980s with the compiler metaphor and weird font technology. An application with visual interface and so on. I've tried Scientific Word and Lyx but both are front-ends for LaTeX. Publicon only produces PDF files by exporting to LaTeX and subsequently using pdflatex. Add-ons for MS-Word are a joke, and webEq is intended for web publishing, not for PDF production. Does anybody know of a decent, scientific-structured document processor that is a modern application?"
I'm going to come right out and say it:
Nobody cares how good your document looks. In the age of the Web, so-called "proper" typsetting is completely obsolete. And that's a GOOD thing.
Seriously. Quit worrying about how your papers look and spend more time on the actual CONTENT. I understand that the "powers that be" in academia are very snooty when it comes to these things, but fuck them. If your paper says something worthwhile, that's all that matters.
Or is the problem in academia that hardly anyone does any work of real interest, and instead try to make up for it with "pretty papers"?
I'll get off your lawn (look at my user number compared to your number) if you'll tell me what the hell wissywig means. All I can think of is that it is a slam vs. WYSIWYG and while that's great and all sometimes that enables people to do things they'd have not been able to do otherwise so I'm at a loss here for reasoning.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
It's an MS Word addon that is specifically designed for highly technical formulas. I cannot personally rate it, as I don't use it. However the people who are using it are professors of electrical or computer engineering, so it clearly works for that field at least.
As a rule, you should mistrust anything electrical engineers do with computers. There is something in their mindset that makes them approach computers in a weird and often highly impractical way, in my (considerable) experience...