Tag Info

For longer pieces, especially those with figures, tables, contents, or internal references, or citations. For shorter pieces (such as an essay) I'd do it in Word or OpenOffice, since I normally don't need the power of Latex and getting it laid out properly won't involve much work. Any writing of decent size, I use latex because: 1) I only worry about ...

Any text-based "markup" format -- LaTeX, HTML, various XML schemas like DocBook, etc -- will serve you better than binary formats like Word, Pages, FrameMaker, etc. (I am aware that some of these tools export XML or SGML.) The reasons include: Decoupling from editors. You can use your favorite tool to edit any of these, which gives you more flexibility. ...

The answer depends a lot on what you have around you and what your needs are; assuming that You don't have extensive needs beyond Latin-1 and Math character sets, or simple use of Unicode character sets You don't have a need for overly-rich or complex page layouts (i.e. you're not doing page layouts that you'd see in a glossy magazine) You don't have ...

It seems there a significant bias in the responses - people who do use are much more likely to care about this question than people who don't. I only use TeX when I'm writing something with lots of equations or figures (I'm a physics student/teacher, so I do that sometimes). Otherwise a word processor is easier for me.

As Viktor said, FrameMaker is probbly the best widely-used tool for doing what you're trying to do. Other considerations: DocBook is a spec, not a tool (as Viktor said). It is XML, so you can use any XML editor to write content. Possibilities include XML Notepad (free), XML Spy (used to be free, not now?), Oxygen ($), Epic ($$). (Personally I just use ...

I'm a huge fan of LaTeX. Though I usually write in something ultra-minimalist (markdown syntax in pyroom lately), before actually showing it to anyone, I'll convert to LaTeX for better formatting control. I'm not sure that counts as "writing in" TeX or LaTeX -- I find anything other than a plain text editor too distracting to the "get this down on screen ...

I've been playing around with Scrivener (for Windows) for a few days now because of * ahem * Lauren Ipsum's almost evangelical zeal regarding the product ; I must admit I'm quite impressed with it so far, and am seriously considering using it permanently. Scrivener 2 does have a form of version control in the form of "Snapshots". I haven't used it as yet, ...

If you're writing fiction, you're asking for trouble by using LaTeX. There are no real advantages to it, except perhaps that since it's only ASCII it will probably never fall into the same black hole as that .xyz file you created years ago in some word processor whose name you can't remember anymore. For technical writing, especially if it includes ...

I love LaTex, but I do not use it anymore simply because every editor I know uses word. Every piece I have written has required multiple rounds of editing using Word's "Track Changes" feature. Sending editors a PDF and asking them to mark it up via text comments (e.g. "2nd graf: capitalize "John") slows down the entire editing process.

Look into Lyx. This is a GUI front end that puts out document files in various formats expecially Latex. You can create a DocBook format document by exporting as SGML and then converting it. See http://wiki.lyx.org/LyX/DocBook

You can use the @unpublished record in BiBTeX to reference an unpublished article/paper. And, although you can get a better answer at Tex.SE as Fran said, it is more specific to technical questions relating to TeX/LaTeX/XeLaTeX/etc. rather than writing style. Ultimately, how you cite the unpublished paper will depend on your field of study and/or what ...

I've been using Celtx for writing screenplays, since it takes care of all of those messy formatting details. And it's free. I had to manually incorporate version control in my writing process, since it doesn't appear that Celtx is capable of version control at this time. I use mercurial for version control. Every time I commit changes to the repository, ...

Best way to write in LaTeX, in my opinion, is to bypass it and use Org-mode in Emacs (a text editor used most commonly by programmers). Org-mode is a feature rich multi-use outline-based editor environment that can export directly to LaTeX/PDF, among other things. Essentially it lets you write using Org-mode's simple formatting and outline hierarchy, ...