Text Editors and Markup Languages

[Finlam]

Hello Playgrounders!

I'm working on a project right now(a loooooooong document), and I wanted to know: what are your favorite text editors or mark up languages? i.e. word, LaTex (http://www.tug.org/tutorials/tugindia/), Open Office, etc... Do any of you use text editors on your phones or tablets? Any thoughts on editors, markup languages, or general document/book design?

[valadil]

Favorite text editor is vim.

I'm really enjoying markdown as a markup language. http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/ I wouldn't use it for anything big, but it's perfect for readme files and bug tracking.

For bigger projects I've used LaTeX. I don't love it and I feel like I'm not even scratching the surface of what it can do, but I'll be damned if the output isn't gorgeous. What I like about LaTeX in the context of a large document is that it forces me to explicitly think about the document's structure. It makes me more conscious of what warrants a paragraph or a section.

[warty goblin]

I remain convinced LaTeX is retribution for humanity's sins. Why oh why do you insist on moving my figures around at the behest of strange and terrible star gods?

But mostly this is because I'm horribly annoyed that nobody's come up with a halfway usable WYSIWYG equation editor for a computer yet. My calculator can manage beautiful textbook quality equation formatting automatically, but on my computer I have to wrestle with the bastard offspring of HTML and a tarantula.

[leafman]

For HTML and PHP text editing I find notepad++ is pretty easy to work with, it highlights tags, helps you keep track of your brackets and such, plus it's free. Thats my only input since I have zero experience with markup languages outside of html, xhtml and xml.

[razark]

For just standard mucking with text, I simply use notepad. For anything more, I use nano.

[Telonius]

I remain convinced LaTeX is retribution for humanity's sins. Why oh why do you insist on moving my figures around at the behest of strange and terrible star gods?


I work for a science journal, and I completely agree. LaTeX is for physicists, mathematicians, and breaking the sanity of everyone else.

[valadil]

I remain convinced LaTeX is retribution for humanity's sins. Why oh why do you insist on moving my figures around at the behest of strange and terrible star gods?


That's why I like LaTeX. I trust it to design the layout of the page. It's better at that than I am and it means I don't have to think about it.

[warty goblin]

That's why I like LaTeX. I trust it to design the layout of the page. It's better at that than I am and it means I don't have to think about it.

My experience with LaTeX is basically as follows. I want to have a graph, labeled as a figure, followed by a couple of sentences explaining said graph. I want several such segments. So, like a reasonable person I insert a figure with reference to my graph, then a text block, and repeat that format until I've talked about all my plots. I hit compile.

And I get one page of text, followed by a page of graphs. LaTeX has apparently decided I'm writing for a species of insect that can read multiple pages at once. Also that about a third of my page should be margins.


(To be fair this may be because I generally do LaTeX via R, so the breakdown might be in the R module that lets the two communicate. I can certainly tell you the error messages it generates are only slightly less intelligible than ancient Etruscan. Oh R, always finding stupid ways to break simple stuff. If only SAS were less horrible...)

[PairO'Dice Lost]

To be fair this may be because I generally do LaTeX via R, so the breakdown might be in the R module that lets the two communicate.

No, it's not, the same thing happens if you're doing LaTeX manually or via other languages. I ran into the same problem typesetting my master's thesis. I discovered that moving lines around one at a time and adding all those parameters to the image tags that tell LaTeX "No, screw your placement algorithms, I really do want this picture right here" will get the job done...eventually. :smallsigh:

[lesser_minion]

For maximum fun, you could always create PDF files by hand with a hex editor.

Personally, my text editor of choice is Sublime Text, and I use Markdown whenever I can get away with it.

[kurokotetsu]

For normal textes, OpenOffice and a normal Word Preocessor is enough. The few times I had to present a "professionalpaper" at college, Latex is the best for writing math. And the few times I've programmed, emacs was the way to go.

[Recaiden]

Emacs for code, nano for real things, and LibreOffice for formatted papers. haven't needed any real equation-handling yet.

[Neftren]

I will reiterate my plug for Sublime Text 2 (http://www.sublimetext.com/) for anything code related (plus Xcode in OSX for anything C/C++/Obj-C related).

LaTeX for typesetting and layout is convenient. If I need to put a figure together, I'll typically use Mathematica palettes to WYSIWIG my way through an equation. You could probably use WolframAlpha to get there too, though I think there's a copy-as-LaTeX limitation (I think two figures, for free users?).

[Drumbum42]

I'd say Libre Office for your everyday word processing, Notepad++ for your scripting/Markup languages, and Eclipse/XCode for your full-blown, IDE-needed, programming languages.

[Socratov]

I use mainly word because everyone I work with doesn't know Latex, but if I had my way I'd use Latex since it does all the markup for you. It does have a slight learning curve but you'll get there soon enough and else you can just copy everything from the Latex wiki... It takes some getting used to, but soon you'll get the gist of it and it will be almost natural...

[Winter_Wolf]

I really wanted to like LibreOffice, but it failed repeatedly to handle my needs vis a vis Chinese language (mixed Chinese/English documents) and there were no fully functional plugins/add-ons that addressed my needs/wants.

So I burned up the last key on my copy of MS Office 2010 to get the Asian language support I desire on my latest computer. What can I say, Office is like Adobe products: you don't necessarily want to use them, but because of how widespread its use is, you're stuck for it if you want wide compatibility with minimal tooth-grinding.

If it came down to Office 2013 or LibreOffice, though, I'd probably just learn to live with tooth-grinding or buy a mouth guard*.

*I was literally grinding my teeth in frustration trying to get LO to do things I needed it to do. Lots of tension headaches and sore jaw action.

[Neftren]

I use mainly word because everyone I work with doesn't know Latex, but if I had my way I'd use Latex since it does all the markup for you. It does have a slight learning curve but you'll get there soon enough and else you can just copy everything from the Latex wiki... It takes some getting used to, but soon you'll get the gist of it and it will be almost natural...

Well, Word does have its advantages too. For instance, the automated Table of Contents and Section Headings is immensely useful, as is footnote insertion, auto-pagination, and a number of other small features I'm probably forgetting. If I need to do anything more complex, the appropriate tool is InDesign at that point (or LaTeX).

[Socratov]

Well, Word does have its advantages too. For instance, the automated Table of Contents and Section Headings is immensely useful, as is footnote insertion, auto-pagination, and a number of other small features I'm probably forgetting. If I need to do anything more complex, the appropriate tool is InDesign at that point (or LaTeX).

the thing is, LaTeX has that too, with just a line of code or command in front of it you can generate all that. the main advantage of word is what you see is what you get: no compiling. the downside is that word can be quite stupid at times with dressing the text, which Latex does better IMO...

[Finlam]

I just found this pdf on LaTex basiscs (http://www.unc.edu/depts/econ/egsa/LaTeX.pdf) and it's awesome! I'm a big fan of focusing on content rather than layout, and I really like LaTex's measure twice, cut once type approach, it saves so much time in editing and is powerful enough to allow me to adjust the most minute detail if needed. Plus, as a programming language, it's very easy to write scripts in other languages that create or convert files into valid .tex files. In short, the more I use LaTex the more I like it, kind of like the exact opposite of MS Word (although I never much cared for that to begin with).

Also, for programming. Notepad++ all the way. =D