Ask HN: MS Word alternatives for writing academic reports

The first thing you need to know about is http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/ which is a fantastic tool.

So I would say that it might be worth reconsidering LaTeX because it has http://www.bibtex.org/ which is excellent for academic papers. The investment to get competent with LaTeX is certainly several hours, but it pays itself back quickly. See http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX for a good learning resource.

For myself, I mainly use http://orgmode.org/ for emacs. This can export as LaTeX, and from there to any of the vast multitude of formats that LaTeX can be converted to. However, if you're not willing to learn LaTeX, then you're probably not willing to learn emacs either: where LaTeX is a matter of hours to learn competently, emacs takes weeks.

I used Markdown to write the bulk of my text for a while, but I found it didn't scale very well to large documents. It is great for blog posts and the like.

thank you very much for the recommendations,

>>I used Markdown to write the bulk of my text for a while, but I found it didn't scale very well to large documents. It is great for blog posts and the like.

what do you use for large documents? does it have references /bibliography supports?

MultiMarkdown might be more suitable for large documents, as it allows the inclusion of files between documents, cross-references etc.

Maybe https://www.writelatex.com/ can help you become familiar with LaTeX? I'm not huge into type-setting myself but there are numerous text editors and markup formats that can export to LaTeX. The bonus is that you can script most of the workflow and cargo-cult what you need to get the document working until you properly figure things out.

I'm a cofounder at wL. If you're new to LaTeX, you might want to check out our online course [1], and we also have a 'rich text' mode that renders equations and some commands inline in the editor, for quicker feedback [2].

[1] https://www.writelatex.com/blog/7-free-online-introduction-t...

[2] https://www.writelatex.com/blog/81

Sorry for being off topic, but I have a writeLaTex feature request/question.

There's only one thing about writeLaTex that convinced me to stop using the service (which I used while learning LaTeX) and to start doing all editing locally. This is the behavior when the connection is lost/dropped momentarily. The red bar appears at the top of the screen, but I'm still able to type, only to have my typing disappear a few seconds later and the cursor reset to the top of the input box. This is incredibly annoying even when it only happens once every 15 minutes. It seems like this could be fixed very easily (just store what I'm typing locally and then sync it to your servers).

Also, this isn't so much a complaint but a feature request: I'd be much less paranoid about writeLaTeX going down when I need to print/access a major report or something if there was a way to automatically save files locally. This could be done using the Dropbox or Google Drive APIs. For an example of these feature, you can try editing a file in Dropbox with https://draftin.com/ .

Thanks a ton, besides these warts I love the product!

Thanks for the feedback. That should now be better: we remember the cursor position for when the connection picks up again. If there's anything else we can help with, just let us know. :)

sounds like a very nice application, i see there are some pricing models (personal, pro, and teaching) which i think is excellent if i am using latex.

but is there a free (limited) plan for someone like me who still trying to learn latex.

Yes, you can sign up for free (https://www.writelatex.com/signup), and there's a lot you can do with a free account.

I used writelatex to learn LaTex and would recommend it. My first experience using LaTex was to write a research report that ended up being about 15-20 pages and included figures, references, etc. I originally just wrote the report in emacs (without typesetting the math, figures, or references), and then it only took me maybe an extra 90 minutes to typeset the whole thing in LaTeX (previously not knowing any LaTeX). Also, using bibtex for my references saved me a huge amount of time, so the net time difference between writing with LaTeX or familiar tools for me was less than 90 minutes.

Overall, I would recommend using LaTeX because its really not too difficult to pick up.

Have you considered LyX? Designed for people with a problem like yours - wanting the benefit of TeX output without the effort needed to learn something new. It's also a pretty good structure oriented (rather than WYSIWYG) editor.

Isn't LyX WYSIWYG ? Personally I would say it is. (and also @vancomycin below). Sure there is also the "WYSIWYM" category, but it's more of a pun and not broadly known.

LyX is not WYSIWYG and I'm not sure how to argue this point. What you see in the editor window doesn't look like the paginated output - it's not really up to someone's opinion to decide.

It's not the paginated output but it's close, especially compared to LaTeX code. And I believe many people understand WYSIWYG broadly as a point and click interface with visual feedback, in contrast to writing some code.

Lyx is a good option for a sort of WYSIWYG LaTeX (http://www.lyx.org/)

thank you, i will look into it

I recommend latex, as once you get going it is not really all that complex, what with all the packages available.

i am considering learning latex, but it looks like it has a steep learning curve compared with markup language like rst or markdown and also it seems very verbose i.e, presentation and content are written whole/completely

LaTex is not a writing application, it is a typesetting application. LaTex should be your last stop before publication.

You can, of course, write natively in LaTex but the program wasn't designed for that.

> You can, of course, write natively in LaTex but the program wasn't designed for that.

Hard to know precisely what you mean by this, but if you mean that you shouldn't be writing things like

    \documentclass{article}

    \begin{document}
    Hello world.
    \end{document}

then you are mistaken; the LaTeX book (and many other documents) describes what to do. If what you mean is that a person is somehow meant to use a front end such as LyX, then you'll get a lot of disagreement (such as from me).

What I mean is that in your example the only content is "Hello world." The rest is typesetting. The original question asked, "what tool should I use to write?" LaTex answers the question, "how can I typeset what I have written?" BTW, Lyx is a terrific program. My only complaint with it is that I haven't found a way to mimic a word processor's tab behavior consistently. The tabbing package doesn't do it for me. \qquad does, kind of, but that's six keystrokes. The problem is that in some kinds of writing text placement may have meaning and this conflicts with LaTex's underlying paradigm of automating typesetting decisions.

LaTeX was certainly intended for a document such as I wrote so you are wrong, as documented in Lamport's book.

Not at all; LaTeX is a wrapper over TeX made exactly to hide all formatting routines behind structural declarations like \section, \itemize or \emph. To this end it is not really different from Markdown; yes, tokens require slightly more keystrokes, but you get something way more powerful and predictive -- Markdown won't give you nested enumerations, tables, references, footnotes, automatic TOCs or figure lists... Niether BibTeX which will happily eat your Mendeley of Zotero library and compile a perfect bibliography, includes that allow you to split your work into several files or macros that can save you from re-typing certain things over and over.

You may not want to use the same tools to write academic reports and blog posts. It's best explained by the popular programming quote that "when you have a hammer, you see every problem as a nail."

LaTeX can get hard, but templates lower the learning curve. Google "latex report templates," learn how to compile them, play with them. Even if it's harder the first day, it will be a lot more useful in the long term.

The learning curve is not a fair excuse not to try it. If you try it, build things with it, and don't like it, you'll know what you're not missing.

Look if anyone in your institution has created a dissertation template for LaTeX, or if you can use one [from elsewhere](https://github.com/briandealwis/ubcdiss). I personally found the formatting to be the hardest part, not the actual writing, especially since you can find helpers for various text editors, like LaTeXTools for Sublime etc.

As pointed out elsewhere in this thread, don't make your hammer solve all of the problems.

As other commenters have mentioned, Pandoc[1] is an incredibly useful tool for converting documents between formats. I do not, however, think that its usefulness in a solution to your specific problem has been framed clearly enough. It uses a version of the markdown syntax which is slightly-modified to ease writing of lengthier or academic documents. For example, a citation to a BibTeX bibiliography (usually performed in LaTeX by typing `\cite{McElroy-2000}`) is written `@McElroy-2000`, headers can be tagged to simplify internal references, and actual LaTeX commands can be called if you need them. Since the changes from standard markdown are minimal, you can write using any of the many markdown editors which are available.

As to my particular setup, I write Pandoc markdown in Vim using a plugin which I wrote for that purpose.[2] Nothing fancy, mind you, just light syntax highlighting, some keyboard shortcuts for (1) exporting to html or pdf (via-LaTeX) and (2) jumping between headers, and document folding, the latter of which is especially useful for outlining and organizing lengthy documents.

[1]: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/

[2]: https://github.com/shushcat/minimd

Lyx. Full stop.

I've used it for two papers for arXiv, with equations and tables. It can write any math formula you can write on paper. You don't need to learn Latex at all to use it. It's very clear and intuitive. It's not WYSIWIG, but it's clear what you're going to get, and what you need to do on-screen to get what you want.

And,if you're on Linux, you should be able to get it running with no sweat.

Markdown and RST is what people generally use for documentation and blog writing.

However, LaTeX has features designed for academic writing (e.g. you can have references to sections / bibliography entries, so when you insert or delete new ones, the numbers in the text are updated automatically.)

You don't mention what subject your thesis is in, but if it involves mathematical notation, you will likely have a lot more work and poorer results if you use anything but LaTeX.

Specifically related to the question of using LaTeX's mathematical typesetting capabilities in documentation or webpages, MathJax [1] is a popular solution. The Python-based static blog generator Nikola [2] has support for MathJax.

As for being intimidated by LaTeX, and being too unfamiliar with alternatives to make a comparison, I suggest spending a day or so trying to write a small part of your report in LaTeX, then deciding after you've used it.

[1] http://www.mathjax.org/

[2] http://getnikola.com/

Thank you everyone for the suggestions and insights. After contemplating with the choices i have decided to go through with restructuredtext, and pickup latex bit-by-bit to incorporate scientific parts (it turns out you can do some inline latex in restructuredtext).

here are some factors that drive my decision:

- i can start writing content right away without much initial learning

- rst can be read/revised by my other peers with more ease than full blown latex document.

- i can use latex parts (equations, typesetting, etc) inline with rst, and i can learn latex bit-by-bit on the way

- there some libraries/program that can make attractive presentations using rst (http://regebro.github.io/hovercraft/#/step-1)

so i will use rst and learn latex on the way.

I'm also an academic. I use Scrivener, then pop it into LaTeX. Scrivener has a non-commercial version for Linux. It's not fully featured, but it still does a good job. You have to download it from their forum: http://www.literatureandlatte.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=33&s...

Learning LaTeX is absolutely worth the time and effort. I realize it's not the easiest thing to learn, but it's invaluable for keeping track of citations, simple typesetting, and rendering equations. It is not, however, worth using for making slideshows or posters.

1. Draft in Scrivener. 2. Export to rtf. 3. Open the file in Open Office. 4. Export to LaTex. 5. Typeset pdf.

You can also export directly from Scrivener to LaTex, but a thesis is going to require a good deal of back and forth and revisions before it is ready for typesetting.

If you don't want to have a typeset final product, you can write in Scrivener and export to many different formats. If you want to write using Markdown syntax, you can do so in Scrivener as well. It's a terrific program.

it looks like a very nice application, but i forgot to mention that i am now mainly using linux and it seems there is no linux version? (and also free (as in free lunch version) :D)

There is a linux version, it's available here:

http://literatureandlatte.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=252...

Word with Zotero makes for a rather painless thesis writing experience.

Just remember to mark headlines as headings, and don't just change the font size of your headlines. It's easy to insert references to formulas, figures and graphs.

LibreOffice + Zotero makes for the some fairly painless bibliography, table of content, internal figure referencing.

If you need to build advanced graphs from large dataset, there is no painless way about it, but LaTex is in no way more difficult than the other options.

Check out asciidoc, it is quite mature. You can start using it quickly, but it's very full-featured and has a supportive community. Can generate text, HTML, Docbook XML, PDF output. Generates nice looking output, customizable, etc.

It's like markdown but more mature and scales to large documents.

http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/

i would probably try using pandoc's markdown http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/README.html#pandocs-markdow... and then generating latex from that. but that's because (imho) markdown is easy to edit / read. getting latex output any different from the default is going to involve "learning latex" i suspect.

pandoc is written in haskell and available on linux. for opensuse you can install it from http://software.opensuse.org/search

[i wrote my own thesis in latex, but that was many years ago. another advantage of starting in markdown is that it's easier to get to other formats, like putting your thesis on the web.]

We're beta-testing an online editor for technical documents, if you want to join we would be glad to have you (email/url in my profile). If you'd prefer a more DIY solution, in addition to LaTeX you should also check out asciidoc, it seems to support a lot of what you're after.

If you want to go with reStructuredText, I highly suggest using Leo[1] -- it uses rST heavily internally, and provides fantastic tools for working with it.

[1]: http://leoeditor.com/

Write it in LaTeX.

I would just learn LaTeX. As far as I know, it is essential to writing a decently formatted whitepaper.