[lug] Free Linux Authoring Tools?

[Chris Riddoch]

I'll put in a couple words for Asciidoc.

I've also been a fan of TeX, and still use it from time to time, but
as others have mentioned it really hasn't integrated well into the
web's ecosystem, aside from MathJax, in which it's impressively much
more intuitive than MathML.

One of the nice features of asciidoc is that it was designed with
being converted to docbook partly in mind.  This means that it works
particularly well for longer technical documents.  It has quite a lot
of tooling available - originally in python, more recently in ruby,
java, and javascript with the asciidoctor project.  It's much better
specified than markdown, though neither could be easily described with
a context-free grammar, they both are more concerned with human
read/editability than with simplicity of parsing.

Just as an opinion, Asciidoc is a bit more polished and professional
than markdown, which is more ad-hoc.  I haven't spent as much time
with it, but sphinx has more in common with asciidoc than it does with
markdown - both have a lot of nice features.

But the nicest features of both asciidoc and sphinx is that you can
just start writing a text file, and simply not *think* about the
detailed structural elements of the document.  In my experience, it's
preferable to simply ignore all that until after you've done most of
the writing, and then go back through in the editing and add structure
as appropriate.

Check out some of the full-screen, prose-centric text editors like
focuswriter and textroom, unless your brain is already trained to
something else.

On Sun, Mar 13, 2016 at 7:20 PM, Davide Del Vento
<davide.del.vento at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Steve,
>
> On Sun, Mar 13, 2016 at 11:35 AM, Steve Litt <slitt at troubleshooters.com>
> wrote:
>>
>>
>> Do you have any ideas how to cure my two problems with Plain TeX?
>
>
> Unfortunately not. Having learned LaTeX for my Master thesis (and then
> strengthened the knowledge for my Ph.D. one), I only occasionally used plain
> TeX. Most often than not, I ended up with the limitations you hinted and
> concluded: "ops, this doesn't work.... who cares, for this I'll use
> full-blown LaTeX"
>
> Sorry I wish I could have been more helpful.
>
>
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-- 
Chris Riddoch
http://www.syntacticsugar.org/