On Sun, Jul 02, 2017 at 01:50:58PM +1000, Andrew Pam wrote:
On 02/07/17 13:21, Craig Sanders via luv-main wrote:
if i was less lazy, or needed to write complex documents more often, I'd make the effort to learn TeX....I can do simple things in it easily enough, but real mastery of it requires more effort and time than i'm willing to put in.
I recommend LyX as an excellent graphical front-end for TeX, and it fully supports embedding raw TeX wherever you want to.
LyX is great for people who like graphical front-ends. I don't, I can't stand them...may as well use a GUI word processor. IMO vi (any vi, preferably vim) is the best tool for editing any kind of text, with markup or without. My only use for tools like LyX is to do things that require more knowledge of TeX than I have....and even then just to get a chunk of sample TeX code that I can modify/re-use in vim. Using the evil power of cargo-culting as a learning tool :) I'm very uncomfortable with using tools that magically do things for me that I don't understand well enough to do myself. I see that as a problem to be fixed, ASAP. Once I know how to do something in a markup language like markdown or TeX, if I need to do it repeatedly I'm inclined to write scripts (usually just awk or perl or sed one-liners) to generate the code - e.g. convert some tab- or comma- separated data into a table. For really simple things, vi/vim's capability for defining editing macros and even ':map' are enough - especially when I need to edit large text files, performing the same operations in lots of places but need to exercise human judgement (e.g. where a global search and replace will do at least as much harm as good). The end result is that I have very patchwork knowledge of TeX - most simple things and some complex things that i needed to do at least once before, but with very large knowledge gaps. Markdown is much simpler, so I have nearly complete knowledge of that, and it's adequate for most of what I need to do. craig -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au>