News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done b... by mNovak on Thursday May 28, 2020 @03:29PM (#23341423)
I agree beautiful defaults help LaTeX, all the more so because I always use someone else's well defined template. But, my main issues with Docs/Word is not just "look", rather:

- smart figure/caption/table handling (no orphaned captions, no figures hanging out in the middle of the page) - easy, label-based cross referencing (not selecting each from a popup interface) - text-based equation input

All that being said, I still have an elaborate Word template I use for proposal writing. Because often I have to pass it off to others (who may not know TeX) to contribute, and sometimes I need to quickly bastardize my nice formatting to squeeze into hard page limits.

ShareLatex / Overleaf is very good, but I'd love to see slightly more ease of use as OP suggests. I'd like to see a switchable WYSIWYG / code editor, so laypeople can make simple formatting changes visually without needing to know the right commands, and it propagates correctly into the underlying LaTeX.

Re:Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done b... by MperorM on Thursday May 28, 2020 @04:44PM (#23342316)
Totally agree with your points. Latex remains the best tool for many tasks.

But none of the things you described, I think latex does particularly well either. Better than Google docs and the likes, sure, but I think it's possible to do better.

I truly think Google Docs could be so much more than it currently is.

They for example built a brilliant speech-to-text feature that is only available on desktop. Mobile is the one place I could imagine using such a feature. Imagine writing your documents with speech while hiking deep in the woods. Feeling the fresh air with a view of a beautiful brook as Google transcribes your thoughts. That's how I want to write!

Why on earth put so much effort into such a brilliant feature, and then have it only be available to users already sitting in front of a keyboard!?

Apologies for the tangent, it was where my mind wanted me to go!