How do you people fulfill your text processing needs?
More specifically: how do you:
- Write documents?
- Keep notes?
- Create presentations (slides)?
These days I mostly write in markdown, and either keep what I write somewhere
online (the wiki), or I convert it to LaTeX, and do a bit of
fine-tuning if need be. This is handled gracefully by either
ikiwiki (which I see mostly as a tool for adding linking
and structure to already existent documents, which are intended to be online) or
by pandoc, which does the markdown->LaTeX
conversion.
I also use the approach described above to handle long documents, which span
through several files. Pandoc lets you concatenate several markdown files and
outputs a single document, with a proper heading. And LaTeX has \include,
\input and \subfiles to cover those cases.
If I need more control over the layout, write math, or any other advanced stuff in the document, I write it using LaTeX. Or I abuse markdown and embed HTML in the markdown code.
Most of the note-taking is done using ikiwiki, or The Vim Outliner.
Regarding slides, I also use LaTeX for that; I create them with the beamer package.
The documents written for any of these tools (markdown/ikiwiki, vim OTL, LaTeX) can be put under version control easily (Git), and since both of them are plain text, even merging different versions and collaborating is a non-issue, provided the collaborator knows a bit of version control.
What do you do, and how do you solve these problems:
- Version control/group collaboration
- Advanced formatting/math
- Generation of online (HTML) and printable (PDF) outputs of the document
- Create one document from several others (say, put together a book when having one chapter per file).
I'm waiting for your comments.
I use vim, latex, wikis, subversion and git. I don't write papers often.
I also use google docs often at work and for simple tasks (sharing a spreadsheet with Melissa's mom, for instance).
I used to use moinmoin, doing slides with it is a breeze because it is another view and splits slides on an
<h1>mark, it versions for me and supports latex.Then I decided I wanted more control over my text files, so I wrote a set of scripts that would crawl directories and generate the appropiate html out of reStructuredText files, it worked neatly till I needed to put some math and then I got stuck. Halfway writing my rest parser to generate pngs with the equations (halfway number-of-lines wise, prob not time-used wise) I decided to give Sphinx a shot, and I liked it.
Now I am using Sphinx, but havent written much lately, so I suppose I havent found problems because of that :P
Para documentos sencillos, como una carta al ISP para pedir la cancelación de la cuenta de internet, uso Open Office. Para documentos más largos, como la tésis o wl CV uso LaTeX sin duda alguna.
A veces también uso un sistema de control de versiones, en mi caso Mercurial, pero no me parece tan práctico porque el sistema de diff basado en líneas y no en palabras no funciona con los documentos también como con el código fuente. Nunca me he puesto a buscar una alternativa para el problema de los diff, no sé si la haya.
Para notas utilizo Tomboy sincronizado a Ubuntu One para tener acceso a las notas desde otras partes.
Presentaciones con OpenOffice, todavía no he aprendido a usar el beamer.
@arhuaco: I tend to forget about google docs; don't really use it that much.
@LinX: Hate you! I think ikiwiki does sanitizing, but I haven't enabled it. I guess.
Didn't know about slides using moinmoin. Interesting.
About Sphinx, hum, dunno. I kind of like it, but got somewhat scared when I saw the fuckton of files and folders it creates for any document. My ideal system is one that lets you do everything in a simple text format, but gives you a way of defining structure, and maps it properly to PDF and HTML documents. Sphinx kind of fits the bill, but is somewhat overwhelming.
@ceronman: oh God yes letters in LaTeX are awful to write. Yet, for personal use, I cheat and recycle any previous letter I can find.
The text, line-based diff system is enough for me, but I think one of the reasons for that is that I keep all my files at 80 characters per line. Have you tried that?
About slides, sometimes *Office is oh-so-handy. But you didn't hear it from me.