WriteMonkey gets better and better

Posted by Dr Andus
Sep 28, 2013 at 10:46 PM

johnmcde wrote:
>You might want to try Lyx. It’s a GUI front end for LaTeX. Lyx is free
>as in free beer and is available for Linux, Mac and Windows. Lyx (and
>LaTeX) are especially suited for academic writing.

Thanks for the suggestion. It does look like Lyx might hit the spot (or one of the spots).

In the previous posts I conflated two wishes. One wish was for distraction-free writing, the other wish was for gaining more control over document structure formatting and typesetting.

WriteMonkey is a bit of a half-way house, as it is great for distraction-free writing, and it even offers reasonably good control over structure and formatting via Markdown (mark-ups for headings, emphasis and block quotes is all I need).

However, to turn it into a complete product (an academic paper for a journal), I need to export the text into Word, so that I can insert my citations from EndNote, create the bibliography, format the paper, so that it can be shared with others and sent to publishers.

That’s where things go pear-shaped, as Word produces all kinds of formatting and typesetting glitches, and EndNote is also awkward, when it comes to tinkering with its styles to meet different journals’ special requirements.

I started to look into LaTex, and it’s clear that it’s far superior over Word in its output and would give me huge control over formatting and typesetting. But there does seem to be a steep learning curve, and some of the LaTex editors I saw for Windows (such as LaTex Editor: http://www.latexeditor.org/screenshots.html) can’t exactly be called distraction-free environments.

Lyx, being WYSIWYM, might be a less daunting way to get into LaTex… I see that people started toying with the idea of converting Markdown into LaTex (which would be the ideal solution: WriteMonkey + Lyx), but the solutions I’ve seen are way over my head and my computing skills…