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Comment by exergy | Hacker News Reader

Not to bellitle your achievements (honestly!), but I do not think your last paragraph can be a commonly encountered scenario.

Either way, I'll back out a bit and ask a more elementary question. Is a workflow possible wherein one writes in anything-but-latex (Word/Markdown etc) and then uses latex to typeset? Because I (and the author) agree with you that a) standardisation is a good thing and b) latex is excellent at typesetting.

What latex is weak at is me writing my paper in it, and then trying to read back whether what I wrote flows well.

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Latex is for typesetting. Remember that when tex was developed typesetting was typically done by someone other than the author. So rather than trying to write initially in latex, write in literally any program you want. Then, take that content and surround it with latex.

However, this won't always be the easiest method. For example, anything math-heavy will almost certainly be easier to type directly in tex markdown.

Org-mode has a similar feel to Markdown, exports to LaTeX, and allows you to embed LaTeX snippets so that you can keep using the Org file as your source of truth, rather than eventually having to do a full switch and edit the LaTeX document full-time.

Another very neat feature is Org-Babel, which allows you to write code in (almost) any language that is then replaced with its output, which is great for example code. It can even pipe stuff through PlantUML, allowing you to embed your diagrams into the source code rather than having to manage them separately.

As an example of what it looks like at scale(-ish), I used this to write my thesis paper[1], and all the other related documentation[2].

[1]: https://gitlab.com/PicoNodes/PicoNodes/blob/master/docs/Repo...

[2]: https://gitlab.com/PicoNodes/PicoNodes/blob/master/docs/Pico...

I'm curious why latex is weak at that? Considering most authors probably just use a notepad equivalent, the idea is if you are finding yourself having to put a ton of markup into the document, you are probably relying too much on items other than the prose to make your points.

That is to say, yes, there is a workflow. It is basically to build the prose out separately from the layout. Latex is used to typeset the document you want to do. Not to author it. By the time you get to it, you probably should be at the point where the markup is what you care about.

That make sense?

Yes, there will be times where you care about how the document looks. That is likely an iterative process and many of us find value in separating the quibbles over the look from the authoring of the content. Both are valuable. Doing them both at the same time is ridiculously hard.

There is not, to my knowledge, a really commonly-used workflow that starts at Word and ends at typesetting. This is something Pandoc purports to do, but I would expect to lose most of your manual formatting tweaks from Word in the process.

Pandoc is a good tool for automating workflows that start with some other format and end with LaTeX.

Another good option if you like Emacs is org-mode, which has a LaTeX export, among other things.

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