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Comment by segmondy | Hacker News Reader

Begin with plain ASCII text. It's very easy to get distracted by the formatting and looks. Content is what's important. So begin with a basic editor like notepad/vi/emacs. Perhaps at best markdown. Get it done, then edited, then you can typeset with something like Latex/Word.

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So many times this. I'm presently developing a lot of documents for my office with a group of people. If we'd just focused on the content, and not the formatting (layout, font, etc.) we'd have been done weeks ago. Instead, just this morning while peer reviewing a document for the final version, we got bogged down in how to format a section and lost 30 minutes to a pointless discussion that should've been saved for the final revision (once the content was reviewed).

Simple markdown or similar to have a rough structuring/formatting that there are many good editors and presenters for today. Then do a pass through with LaTeX or Word or whatever to (LaTeX may be more appropriate for certain technical documents) after you've written up the content.

I don't see why Latex shouldn't be used for that. Whether you write # (markdown) or \section (Latex) to start a new section doesn't really matter for you as a writer, but the latter already gives you a correctly formatted basic version "for free" (who would be insane enough to use Word for an entire textbook?).

If you get distracted by the formatting and looks during the writing process, then just limit yourself to the basic Latex commands (\section, \emph, etc.).

Just that. Maybe Word in the first place, for the spell checking. But, other than that, just use it as a plain text editor.

I also find it useful to create a new file for each chapter.

You don't need Word for spell checking. For instance, Emacs can use ISpell, ASpell, etc.

And in emacs you can use org mode with export to pdf though latex

Good to know. I'll check if Sublime Text supports spell checking as well :)

Latex is a bad recommendation I'd say. Just use AsciiDoc. The rest I agree with.

Writing in LaTeX is a bad recommendation indeed. It's huge (my install is over 5gb) it's slow (my thesis took minutes to render), hard to work with, has terrible error messages, and it is beyond difficult placing figures where you want them.

It is the easiest syntax for equations, but not everyone needs those. It does look better than Word, but it is a very high cost for a bit of good-looking.

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