Erik Christiansen via luv-main <luv-main@luv.asn.au> wrote:
Today you could use Vim and Latex - with that you can compose a book with even mathematical symbols like integral signs. I've heard of Markdown, and understand that Vim has some support, but haven't looked into it. It should be lower hanging fruit than Latex.
Markdown is syntactically simpler, easier to convert to other formats such as HTML, OOXML, ODF or EPUB, thanks to Pandoc, but doesn't give you the control over presentation offered by LaTeX, or its wealth of optional packages. I like Markdown, with Pandoc, for relatively simple documents, but I prefer to write papers in LaTeX. I wrote my Ph.D. thesis in LaTeX, taking advantage of the automatic citation and bibliography generation tools available (see BibLaTeX). Unfortunately, I've encountered journal and book editors who demand Microsoft Word (OOXML) format, or RTF, with very specific formatting, in which case, document format conversion and subsequent formatting and editing in a word processor are a necessity.