Word Processing/Document Formatting

dartleader · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 21 Apr 2019 Posts: 119

Hello everyone,

I've been accepted to graduate school which will involve a lot of writing and word processing. Currently doing some research and seeking the advice of those who have gone down this route already or do a significant amount of word processing.

I use neovim and am trying to research my options for formatting .txt files to produce .pdfs.

Out of latex, markdown, groff and pandoc, does anyone have any particular arguments for or against any of these?

I am leaning towards latex as it seems to be the standard in academia, and has a huge following; I had thought it was only for mathematics and scientific papers but based on a little research it seems like it can be used for general document processing as well.

flexibeast · Posted: Tue Jun 13, 2023 3:48 am Post subject:

Context: i've used LaTeX in an academic context (albeit only as a student), have ported s6-ecosystem documentation to mdoc(7) (cf. my user page on the wiki), and my experiences of dealing with Markdown (in the generic sense; explanation below) involve creating a script to convert Markdown to LaTeX in order to ultimately produce a PDF. As a result, i have Opinions(tm).

My perspective is essentially the same as this commentary on undeadly.org:

sMueggli · Guru Joined: 03 Sep 2022 Posts: 370

I also would recommend Latex for this kind of work. But I am avoiding text processors like Word and LibreOffice where I can.

As an alternative to markdown I can recommend asciidoc (with the AsciidocFX editor).

Goverp · Advocate Joined: 07 Mar 2007 Posts: 2009

I was working on a book in LibreOffice Word, and realised I needed to reformat it to a better page size, and didn't like the results. A friend in academia suggested LaTeX. Much better results.

I use LyX to tame LaTeX. It's not perfect, and you end up doing a fair bit of native LaTeX code (such as cover pages) using "Evil Red Text" (LyX puts native code in a Red box), but it generally works well and makes it much easier to navigate the source and prevent coding errors.

LyX supports many LaTeX to PDF backends; I recommend pdflatex together with the micro-typographic extensions; the results when printed are excellent. The downside is you are restricted to fonts shipped with LaTeX unless you import others, which is moderately tedious. IIUC XeTeX can use any font installed on your system, not just ones shipped with LaTeX.
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Greybeard

dartleader · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 21 Apr 2019 Posts: 119

Thanks everyone, that's clinched it for latex.

I've been playing around with pdflatex and working on some basic formatting and it seems to be exactly what I was looking for.

mrbassie · l33t Joined: 31 May 2013 Posts: 772 Location: over here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8EKH_fjmXA

Might be of interest.

dartleader · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 21 Apr 2019 Posts: 119

SiberianSniper · Posted: Wed Jun 14, 2023 8:18 pm Post subject:

I'd give another vote for LaTeX, although I have fairly limited experience with the other options. I prefer LaTeX for its flexibility, the number of optional packages, the huge amount of documentation, and most importantly to me, the distinct look of the final document. It's a defacto standard for a reason.

Pro tip: LaTeX, groff, and Markdown all offer easily diffed files for version control, and you can use Makefiles for creating .pdf or other documents from the raw files.