Comment by igravious | Hacker News Reader

Comment by igravious | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I taught myself LaTeX to be able to write academic papers. It was invaluable in teaching me about a large part of the document processing ecosystem I knew nothing about and made me appreciate that WYSIWYG was a step backwards to some degree.

Strangely enough though for the current paper I have to write (> 20,000 but < 40,000 words) I have decided to see how far I can get with Markdown, Pandoc, and a lightweight custom pipeline. I'm going on a hunch but I have the feeling that this will work out ok. I may be wrong. Pandoc will auto-gen a table of contents from the Markdown headers. I'm going to try and grab citations straight from Zotero. AnnotateJS will give me endnotes but also allow others to make annotations and I should be able to generate HTML5+RDFa for semantic annotation. And yes, PDF because the university requires it -- I think I'll be able to go to PDF via LaTeX with Pandoc. Markdown does blockquotes too. I don't need complex Math, but I will need notation for propositional/predicate calculus. There really aren't that many _elements_ in an academic paper when you break it down to its constituent components and Markdown+extensions seems to have it all covered.

Pollen, which featured here recently, looks interesting too and I'm going to investigate that.

Edit: I've used Overleaf (and love it!) and even demo'd it to others and I think it's a great product. Scrivener is doing interesting things as well.

Firstly, thanks for helping spread the word about Overleaf, that's much appreciated! If you're still demoing with it, feel free to join our Advisors programme [1] (it comes with a free Pro+ account amongst other things!)

Be very interested to hear how you get on with your current paper -- it is one you're working on independently or do you have co-authors? If it's the latter, do you have a workflow for handling the collaboration?

Thanks also for the note about Pollen, will take a look at it in the morning!

[1] https://www.overleaf.com/advisors

I should be thanking you. The issue we have is that science-type students have no problem working with LaTeX. Our humanities students on the other hand will use MS Word which as we all know is completely suboptimal for creating long structured documents with lists of tables, figures, and so on.

We've found that by importing our university branded template into Overleaf and getting to our humanities students to think about their work as a structured document we can try to transition them away from MS Word. Unfortunately I think all bar two kept their old workflow.

Do check out the video by Pollen creator and typography nerd "(fourth RacketCon): Matthew Butterick — Like a Blind Squirrel in a Ferrari" linked from http://pollenpub.com/ His argument is that LaTeX has hindered innovation because it is so good. He gives his reasons for re-inventing the wheel with a Racket DSL. In the end we may realise the errors of our ways and come crawling back to LaTeX :)

    is completely suboptimal for creating long structured documents

I actually saw many science students work very well with MS Word. They knew how to use it and liked it, whereas I completely despised it as I was never able to fit an image properly for example. To me, LaTeX seemed completely logical and superior to MS Word, but I have seen long documents typeset using Word also.

The people who liked MS Word had no programming knowledge, if that's an indicator ;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com