750m download for LaTex, ouch…, not going to try it now. Why it is so massive?

(This link http://www.tug.org/protext/)

@ xWittaker:

Yeah, collaboration with non LaTex people sucks. I’m in the same situation at work – all the internal documents are in MS Office. Actually, I am required to have 3 versions of office installed on my machine in parallel because we do have some documents generated by our clients that only work in Office 2003 (hackish 3rd party macros crash terribly in 2007), some other documents that have add-ins that leverage Office 2007 features, and one mega-hack which consists of a clusterfuck of VBA code that hooks into Microsoft Binder (which was discontinued after Office 2000). Fun times. :)

@ Gui13:

Thank you. I have fixed it.@ Chris:

Yes, this is exactly what I meant. When I create plain text documents I habitually make markdown style headings just because they look good.

@ jambarama:

Huh, what do you know. I thought they were out of the game. Glad to see they are still hanging around and found their niche. This was actually the first office suite I used on the PC platform. :)

@ smuf:

Personally I don’t really mind compiling to see how many pages I have written. LaTex provides the sematic blocks just fine. Since I usually use a programmers editor like vim, or a dedicated Tex suite stuff like \section{Foo} tends to stand out quite a bit.

When I do use plain text, I usually go for Markdown style headings.

@ Avi Flax:

Ulysses looks interesting. Have you tried LyX? It is a WYSIWYM editor (what you see is what you mean). It is still very entranced in the WYSIWYG way of thinking but slightly better.

@ Zak McKracken:

Very good point, thank you. When I said “proprietary file formats” in my mind I was talking only about MS Office. :)

@ Zak McKracken:

You know, I find that with LaTex you set up your figure/table/citation code once, and then it just works. It will stay in the same place, and look the same no matter what you do. With MS Office, Libre Office you will need to fiddle with it every time you add anything above it, or change document properties such as margins.

As for the internal versioning stuff – it’s probably less than ideal system. For one it balloons up the file size. Two, if the file gets corrupted, you lose the entire history.

@ Chrissy:

Ugh… I once inherited maintenance duties for a Joomla based page, with tons of content, all of which was copied and pasted from word. It was such a mess, that on certain pages, deleting a single character in the built-in visual editor in Joomla could cause a cascade of changes that would end up in certain fonts changing color, images shifting on page, and the entire layout breaking.

Also, I once had a boss who had an internal WordPress blog where he posted news, and interesting industry articles for the employees. He would write every single entry in Word and then paste it in.

The end result was somewhat interesting with every entry being in different font (Times New Roman, Arial, Verdana, etc..). I also loved when he would copy and paste quotes from online articles while preserving formatting.

So the entry would start in 10 point Times new roman, then you would get some fancy sans-serif font for the quotation in 12 points, and the rest of the entry would continue in 11 point Arial.

@ Eric:

You think this is a joke, but I actually knew people who had this font/color combination set up in their Outlook. Their emails would quite literally (and by literally I mean figuratively) stab you in the eyes. :P

@ MrJones:

TexMaker is great. I used it on Linux because Kile didn’t have inline spell-checking and I liked it enough to phase out my use of TexNicCenter on Windows. :)

Org-mode + Emacs, great for structured text and works with minimal markup. Of course, I haven’t written anything over a few thousand words in length, so I’m extrapolating.

this is my favourite :)

http://www.xm1math.net/texmaker/

@ Eric:
Clarification: With ‘formatting’ I meant – setting displa yoptions – for suicidal writers I do suggest ‘Comic Sans’ Size 15 bold in cyan on magenta background ;)

I do my writing in Darkroom, it’s lean and you can adjust the formatting for something you like.

Darkroom has no real version control, but each time you start it up, it’s opening the last edited file as a new document, so when saving you can store it with an versionnumber filename1 filename2 etc.

I work with Plone, and I have seen clients countless times type up something in Word, to then paste it in a WYSIWYG editor in their site. All those invisible tags get copied, too, and then can start breaking things. It’s getting better, at least now TinyMCE will recognize when you are pasting content, and will give you a plain text window for pasting.

I do all my development with TextMate, and use TextEdit (default Mac program) for .txt files.

One more error:
The TeX document should probably end with
\end{document}
:)

Other than that: I think most of your tips are quite right, although I think some of your personal preferences have crept in in a few spots.
I’ve used Openoffic eand LaTeX for writing theses (also Word, but that was a horror). In the end I stuck with OpenOffice (these days: LibreOffice).
Why? Because you do need some formatting while you write a thesis! You need to declare headings and chapters, literature references and images, and you’d better do it right when writing, while you still know what you’re trying to reference there…
That also works with both TeX and any office package, but the thing that drove me to OpenOffice is not having to remember all of those commands and stuff. And having figured out in what order things need to be done in OpenOffice. Also, I have problems with the placement of pictures in both programs, but in OpenOffice, at least I see immediately what something will be misplaced, not only after compiling.
But that, again, is probably a matter of taste or habit more than an objective decision. It completely depends on how you prefer to work.

As for backup and verioning: I’m using backintime for both at the same time. It’s probably not the same as git, but as a non-programmer I didn’t want to start learning that, and it’s a lot better than saving xxxx_v1, xxxxx_v2 … etc. to a USB disk.
I should probably go and learn to use the LO-internal versioning. You can just save a new version within the same file. But I can’t really say how it works and how reliable it is, and I’m not gonna test it now.

Speaking of which, I have a thesis to finish … cheers.

“…and Open/Libre Office editors take up lots of memory, … Their proprietary file formats are prone to corruption”

You’re not completely wrong with this essay here, but that’s one thing that should be put straight: Openoffice works on the Open Document Format, which is not only, as the Name suggests, open, it is also an ISO standard, and everyone can read it in plain text, you just need to feed the binary file to unzip. Granted, a layman will not understand any of what goes on in there, but the format is not proprietary. There are even other applications that use UDF as their main format, here’s a list:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument#Software

… some of those programs might actually be better suited for writing a book, and you still get a file that you’ll be able to read when MS has long abandoned .doc, and .docx, and whatever the successor might be, because one of the programs in the list above will still be around somewhere.

I’d like to help my wife move from WYSIWYG writing, wherein she’s constantly distracted by formatted, to semantic writing. But I’m certain that TeX won’t work — it’s just too alien, brittle, and verbose for her. I’d lean towards something like Markdown but unfortunately it doesn’t have support for footnotes, and anyway I’d have to rig up a Markdown-to-properly-formatted-PDF script, which she wouldn’t be able to configure or customize in any way. So I’m considering seeing if I can get her to try out Ulysses, a Mac semantic word processor which is apparently inspired by TeX but is more approachable for non-technical people.