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submitted 1 year ago by balderdash9@lemmy.zip to c/196@lemmy.blahaj.zone

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[-] ccdfa@lemm.ee 8 points 1 year ago

Probably fucked it up trying to use all the keyboard combinations.

Joking! I like emacs better than vim for coding, but does anyone have any good text editors for essay writing? I work in academia and need something like a word processor, not a text editor (I work in philosophy and latex isn't great for this. Maybe in a maths setting, but not for philosophy and not for me). So far onlyoffice is the best I've found, but I'd like something that fits in with my hyprland setup nicely, and only office doesn't.

[-] lobster_teapot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 year ago

Depends on what you're looking for. If you're deadset on wysiwyg editors, then yeah, onlyoffice is as good as it gets if you want to keep it foss and don't like libreoffice. Otherwise people seem to like the many scientific markdown editors. But honestly if you already know emacs then just... emacs. I'm in academia too and with the right set of packages it can fit an academic workflow pretty nicely. I write in org mode with org-superstar, olivetti mode to center text in org, varying fonts and font size for headers, citar for references (that syncs with a realtime bibtex export from my zotero library). With the added bonus of having all the usual goodness (magit, projectile, you name it).

[-] ccdfa@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

I'll have to take a look at these packages and see if I can make it work for me. How do you handle exporting to PDF or other workable formats (e.g. Word) for use by other faculty or students? Further, how does your formatting within emacs hold up for publishers? Thanks for the response here, it is the most helpful.

[-] lobster_teapot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 year ago

For pdf export, you can just org-export-to-pdf. In the background it translates your doc to a latex file and then compiles that (I know you stated you didn't lile tex, but in case you can bear a few command this is actually super useful as it gives you more control over the doc, you can just insert random latex part in your doc and it will handle them nicely). Same for publishers. You can just translate your file to tex and that will fit most of the publication processes. Otherwise you can just convert your doc to pretty much anything with pandoc (including .docx).

Keep in mind however that this is basically just saying: I like the idea of latex (fine granularity at compile time, raw text and reproducibility) but I prefer org markup for common marks like headers, bold and refs, and I like having a somewhat pretty editor. If your issue with latex is that writting and formating are not synchronous, than yeah this is not for you.