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Comment by jwr | Hacker News Reader

I used to do all my work in LaTeX, but recently gave up: life is too short. And before you do the "vehemently disagree" thing, think about the last time you had to typeset a text in LaTeX with lots of figures (as in, 2 or 3 per page), or tables. Enough said.

Pages on a Mac gives me all of the typography features outlined in that article. Actualy, it gives my pretty much everything I need, except for unbreakable spaces (argh) and good support for numbered figure captions.

Positioning LaTeX as a "competitor" to WYSIWYG is wrong, instead one should mock Word and OpenOffice for poor typography features.

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I use LaTeX specifically because I have lots of figures. Word's handling of figures is monstrous: moving them around at the drop of a hat is just awful.

Tables are definitely easier in WYSIWYG.

Some sort of typographic valhalla would be Markdown syntax with LaTeX equations and figures, BibTeX bibliographies and WYSIWYG tables.

EDIT: It looks like Pandoc does this! Awesome!

You mention BibTeX and valhalla in the same sentence, I gather you never had to modify BibTeX styles? Or code in BAFLL ("BibTeX Anonymous Forth-Like Language")?

Interestingly, I like tables in LaTeX better. Not because I like the syntax of LaTeX, but because it is much easier to get a program to spit out LaTeX tables (and have LaTeX use them automatically) then dealing with WYSIWYG.

Failing that, you can take your data (originally suitable for gnuplot) and make it suitable for LaTeX to \include{} via

  cat data.tsv | sed -e 's/<tab>/ & /g;s/$/\\\\/'

And then you can put all this into a Makefile or whatever you prefer. :)

I do this using org-mode's tables pretty frequently. It's the way I generate 95% of my Latex tables.

I'm surprised no one mentioned Lyx yet (http://www.lyx.org/) This is a WYSIWYM processor (What You See Is What You Mean) :) It lets you write text and formulas in a close to wisiwig thing but its all latex inside.

Indeed. But it's a pain to use compared to writing LaTeX source code.

I've found that just writing LaTeX source is much easier than tracking down the appropriate menu item/dialog box in Lyx. Plus, LaTeX is more commonly installed than Lyx, so I'm more likely to be able to work on school computers, and if it comes down to it I can edit my LaTeX source in any old editor, then test it at home.

> I used to do all my work in LaTeX, but recently gave up: life is too short. And before you do the "vehemently disagree" thing, think about the last time you had to typeset a text in LaTeX with lots of figures (as in, 2 or 3 per page), or tables. Enough said.

There are some editors that make this much easier, like Gummi. You can just type in the info and it inserts it for you.

Are you sure unbreakable spaces aren't supported? I'm not sure quite which cases you're talking about, but pressing Option-Space to insert such a character always works for me.

http://www.lyx.org

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