For the longest time I’ve stuck to using LibreOffice since I need to often write out reports for school, but sometimes I find using LibreOffice to be very unintuitive and finding out how to do things equally confusing. Most recently I struggled with trying to reliably set up hanging indents, instead I found out how to manually move the indent by a margin (which I guess works, but there’s other issues with that).
I recently had the idea to maybe start using TeX editors, since I know a little bit of LaTeX and have used editors like Overleaf before to write out simple reports. I’d do the transition over a few months so I can grow accustomed to it, but I haven’t found any editors that immediately caught my interest.
Anyways, long story short, what are some editors that you use for writing out reports? Ideally these editors export to PDF, since that’s definitely important for school papers. Doesn’t have to be TeX, anything goes!
As someone who used Tex and friends for 15 years…yeah I second the typst suggestion. Tex is more powerful but wholly unintuitive, I ended with a bunch of magic code that I was copy-pasting/including across projects because it’s impossible to remember everything, and debugging weird issues because I only ran some processor steps 3 times instead of 5 times and the intermediate files didn’t generate correctly, etc. And a lot of solutions you find are outdated because the Tex processor du jour has changed many times; I found one processor supported some functionality but not others. I spent a lot of time trying to do basic things like set a font for non-English languages (ended up using Xelatex… which no one uses anymore.)
Typst has been a far more sensible experience (though of course has its own limitations).
Alternatively you could use markdown and use pandoc to output pdfs, I believe pandoc has some lua scripting engine if you prefer - but that seems overkill for most uses.
I concur! Nix made things at least reproducible, but *TeX requires way too much active context to use comfortably. I suspect it has to be your day job if you want to make adequate use of it. Overleaf just never clicked for me, either.
I haven’t tried typst, but from a quick glance it looks like they have the right goals. I’ll probably try that next time I write a document.
I don’t recommend the pandoc route either, personally; IME pandoc produces inferior quality and isn’t significantly less cumbersome than *TeX, especially if you have slightly more complex requirements for what you’re writing or start mucking with preprocessors.
If you still want to keep using LaTeX I had the best experience with Emacs and the Auctex extension or directly from Org mode to LaTeX.
It’s not for everyone but it was the setup that I enjoyed the most when writing my thesis.
These days I do most of my writing in markdown files in Obsidian or Neovim. Obsidian has a built in export PDF feature which is good enough for me. If I want the PDF to be more structured (like a resume / CV) then I use Google Docs.
I mainly use LibreOffice for schoolwork and apostrophe for markdown. Typewriter is a newly added editor like apostrophe but for typst, I want to try it a bit more but I haven’t learned typst
I personally use emacs’ org-mode. It took me two tries before settling to that program (I tried for one month, moved back to using Markdown for a few months then gave org-mode its chance again and never moved back).
Typst is pretty awesome! I use LibreOffice for school, but mainly because my school and past work has been pretty Microsoft centric, and LibreOffice has excellent Excel and Word support. On the self hosted web front, I’ve heard good things about openDesk.
+1 on this. At Uni, I used to be able to send math assignment very fast with org-mode, emacs, org-babel and sagemath as a CAS system. Essentially, would be able to do all my work in a single document and render it as a LaTeX PDF.
So e.g., you get code blocks (that you can run and render), math (that you can render), CAS code (that you can render) etc. Back then I packaged my reports with Guix, but now I do it for other documents with Nix. It’s an amazing stack for turning in homework fast, and you’ll also get to do reproducible science, which means that you can go back years later when you’ve forgotten how you did things and reuse the work you did.
The only danger is that it’s really hard to use something else when you get used to this.
