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Comment by Slartie | Hacker News Reader

One of the key aspects about LaTeX that made me very productive with it was that I could just dump lots and lots of text pretty much directly from my brain into the plaintext editor, without thinking much about the intricate details of the layout. I suspect that an important "feature" that enabled this was the fact that I didn't have the exact layout present and visible in front of me all the time, but just the semantic aspects of it - until I manually triggered a compilation to actually get everything laid out.

However, this is still an awesome editor, and I would probably have loved to use the near-instant WYSIWYG updates for more complex and layout-sensitive parts of papers, like tables and such. I'd just wish this editor would allow to disable the distracting layout rendering completely for "dump-text-from-brain" phases.

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For me it was the reverse. Layout and content always went hand in hand, with both engaging and influencing each other.

I have noticed these different approaches, text as 'data' irrespective of presentation and text as an element part of a holistic piece of work, to be strongly preferred by different people and either of them struggling to be productive when mismatched.

This is a good observation. Interestingly, I'm quite a visual writer in that the final form of the piece influences my writing. However, I still prefer the latex workflow of entering the text in a raw form coupled with regular compilation into the final layout. Perhaps as a developer of just feels more like coding to isolate and iterate.

I think that this is because the source form is visual as well and an author in the process of writing has completely different formatting needs than a reader.

Exactly. My writing process is always sort of "two-phased". First get the content right, use semantic commands (section, theorem, keyword, algorithm listing, etc). For this the LaTeX plaintext is great, I define macros for everything that I'm going to use more than a couple of times that has a semantic meaning. Then, the second phase is adjusting the layout/typography to convey my meaning in the best way possible.

I’m currently working on a project where I’m using Pandoc which allows me to write and outline in Markdown with embedded LaTeX when necessary. When I have a new “style” I want to apply - indexable category, figures and summary information, etc. - I create a new macro and use that inline. My particular project has a lot of repeating elements, imagine a review of all Chevrolet’s, so one section has a significant number of pages that follow a similar structure - a table of common details, an image, a review.

So far, it’s working for me. Along with GNU make, Inkscape (for turning SVG to PDF), I’ve been happy with what I have with minimal embedded layout.

This sounds great.

Do you have an example or blog post? Very interested in seeing the macro part and everything pulled together.

I agree. Brain-dumping `\begin{float}[t]` while writing seems more natural than thinking "go to this menu, click this option, see if it inserted the float, and choose 'top' in its location properties dialog".

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