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Comment by ot | Hacker News Reader

I agree with the overall sentiment, but I don't think that any WYSIWYG alternative exists yet that:

- Interacts well with version control: it is trivial to maintain a LaTeX document in a git repo, and the diffs are readable (especially with --color-words)

- Makes it possible to programmatically generate formatted text, tables, graphs, possibly from external data sources, either with the internal macro language or through an external scripting language

- Has reasonable separation of content and formatting. For example when submitting the same document to multiple conferences it is almost trivial to adapt the content to the required formats.

If writing mostly prose, these may not matter much, but for technical writing I would rather not do without them.

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Docbook and DITA do, with WYSIWYG editors like

https://www.oxygenxml.com/

http://ditaworks.com/ditaworks-pro-easy-desktop-dita-authori...

http://www.xmlmind.com/xmleditor/

http://easydita.com/

Or for general purpose editing, Word like style, Framemaker

http://www.adobe.com/products/framemaker.html

Last time I used LaTeX for anything serious was in 1999.

Not sure about math, but dtp packages like framemaker are actually a half-decent alternative to LaTeX.

If you really want a word processor - I would recommend abiword over Ms word any day - but I still think you're better off in Lyx - but like all(?) Gui programs, it does seem to be easier to mess up your document (which could probably be fixed editing the underlying LaTeX - but if you're already comfortable doing that...).

Classical dtp packages will typically separate up text editing and layout. But then you need an editor to edit your text...

> Not sure about math, but dtp packages like framemaker are actually a half-decent alternative to LaTeX.

It appears that a license for framemaker costs over $1200 while LaTeX is free.

To command that sort of price, an alternative needs to be far more than a half-decent alternative.

True, framemaker was never cheap. I may also be conflating personal experience a bit with PageMaker or some other package - but I seem to recall FrameMaker was popular as a site licence as university. I did find this interesting review/preview of framemaker for Linux from 2000 - it was a beast - more than 20MB! :-)

http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/previews/1812/1/

At any rate in the world of Free software, Scribus would probably be the dtp alternative that stands out.

For something in-between, Pagestream might be worth a look.

As for a commercial offering being expensive and only half-decent - that's pretty common for Free software - many Free software packages are incredible value. Things like zfs, postgresql, etc etc.

I believe that Google Docs actually handles all of those.

It does, but it has a lot of the same problems as MS Office, some worse. The scripting/macro system is arcane, proprietary, and only works in the cloud. The files aren't in an easily parseable format. You can export them to OOXML/ODF, but then you're stuck with parsing some ridiculously complex markup. As far as I know the version history is not exportable either.

Also, once I wanted to write some light math equations in a google doc and went hunting for plugins that provide just a bit of TeX-like math functionality. I did find something called "Auto LaTeX Equations", but it didn't really work all that well. It did let me typeset equations, but they came out very pixellated for some reason. I also found "gMath", but couldn't persuade it to render any equations.

How would Google Docs update a graph in a document from an external graphics file?

All my graphs and tables are generated in some programming environment, and updated frequently. In Word, I would have to right-click every single graph, select new source file, adapt graph size... Could Google Docs do this?

Make it a link to the file in Word instead of embedding it. Then it auto-updates in the document as well.

Don't know about external files, but it can update charts from sheets, and you can also write a script that does it automatically, both on word and gdocs.

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