Re: Which latex editor?

[Stroller <..hidden..>]

On 15 Oct 2007, at 10:34, Pongracz Istvan wrote:
> ...
> I try to use a WYSIWYG editor to import existing tex documents for
> editing.
> ...
> Or should I start new documents from scratch? :) But which editor? :)

I tried a couple of WYSIWYG editors for editing invoice.tex and  
decided they were a joke.

Of course I don't have so many packaged options on my Mac as you may  
do if you're using Linux on your desktop, so you may be luckier than I.

But the conclusion I came to was that TeX - philosophically speaking  
- shouldn't be edited with a WYSIWYG editor. It's intended not to be.  
The whole point of TeX is that you should compose your whole essay in  
your favourite text editor, concerning yourself only with content &  
not with WYSISWG formatting.

    \title Here's my document
    \subtitle It's just an example
    \newpage
    Next came a Raven, that liked not such folly:
    He belonged, they did say, to the witch Melancholy!
    Blacker was he than blackest jet,
    Flew low in the rain, and his feathers not wet.
    He picked up the acorn and buried it straight
    By the side of a river both deep and great.

Why would you need a WYSIWYG editor for that? Are you going to format  
one word in one font, the next in another? No! IMO the only benefit  
of an editor for LaTeX is if it recognises LaTeX formatting commands  
(in the above example "\title", "\subtitle" and "\newpage") and show  
them in a "faded" colour, so they clutter the text less when I'm  
typing my novel.

L-SMB's use of LaTeX is a bit of an "abuse", IMO - it happens to work  
very well (understatement), but it's not really what LaTeX is  
intended for. Like I say, experimentation may find you better  
experiences than mine, but the WYSIWYG LaTeX editors I tried just  
produced a horrible mess. I think you really have to edit the  
invoice.tex in a rext editor and print a copy of the invoice - or  
email it to yourself - to inspect the results. This may sound like a  
bit of a chore, but it's really not too bad - I spent a lot of time  
doing foo.tex samples (like the above example, for instance) outside  
of L-SMB, anyway; it takes a while to grok the syntax, and once you  
can get a table formatted correctly with Apples, £5, qty 2, £10,  
Pears, £1, qty 1, £1 then it's really trivial to copy & paste that  
into invoice.tex and add in the <? LSMB> formatting.

Nano FTW!

Stroller.