What word processor do you use for technical documents?

Question

I searched for a while for the word processor used to write technical documents, and I really did not find it. Which would be very nice to have an editor that can handle math expressions, code, and pseudo code pretty well. I have yet to find one that works very well.

Does anyone have any recommendations?

Answer 1

My answer is long, so I want to say in advance: I think you want OpenOffice Writer (I use v2.4, have not tried 3.0 yet).

I used Word with the equation editor and LaTeX in the past and OpenOffice Writer recently. I used the first two when I was writing my dissertation.

LaTeX may still have advantages in output quality and the ability to use text version control, but at this point OO Writer is drastically reduced.

Microsoft with the equation editor, even with the most recent versions, seems to be very weak.

What I like about OpenOffice is that you can use the formatting mechanisms of the equations in a mode where the window is split between the document you are writing and the other where you can enter very accurate LaTeX formatting instructions. One of the great strengths of LaTeX is that you can introduce something like $ x \ in S $ for "x is an element of S". OO Writer allows you to do this and see the result.

Back when I wrote my dissertation, LaTeX was preferable to Word with Eqn. Editor because of the length of my document (more than 200 pages), the quality of the results, and the simplicity of determining equations. LaTeX has a lack of ease of use, which has been exacerbated by OO Writer.

Nevertheless, I am sure that I will use OO Writer for conferences in journal articles (~ 8-15 pages from ~ 15-40 pages), as well as for shorter work. For working with abstracts, I'm not sure what I end up using: Word has never worked so well for me on a longer question; I suspect that OO Writer behaves better, but I do not have enough experience to make a firm judgment.

Answer 2

I personally believe in LaTeX. Benefits:

• You can focus on content by form.
• Use logical rather than semantic formatting (e.g. \ methodname instead of italic).
• Easier to collect large documents from multiple files.
• Use text version control (CVS / SVN / etc.)
• Widely used
• Much more stable even on super-weak machines
• Programmable. For example, I use macros to hide things, highlight stuff, obfuscate names using a macro name with a real name, but with intricate replacements.
• See all the tips and tricks available on SO.
• The output looks the same no matter what platform you are compiling on. There has never been this luck with the word, each version and each machine creates something a little different.

Answer 3

I like LyX ( http://www.lyx.org/ ) - this is a good compromise between "spending all your time writing down your document" and "spending all your time writing markup." The latest versions are available even!

In addition, Word 2008 is actually pretty good if you use styles and other "advanced" features.

Answer 4

I totally agree that L ^A T _E X is a good choice. I used for paper at the university, including my master's thesis. For L ^A T _E X I used Kile .

But there is currently an interesting alternative that is DocBook with the MathML Extension .

Answer 5

LaTeX with TexMaker got me through the gradient school.

Answer 6

Depends on what you mean by "word processor." If you do not mind using the WYSIWYG interface, I would recommend LaTeX ( http://www.latex-project.org/ ).

I wrote my last master's thesis using it, which contains many pseudo-codes, formulas, etc. Also displayed in a format fairly typical of technical documents.

Answer 7

I am using FrameMaker .

Answer 8

MS Word with Mathtype . It has several advantages over the default Equation editor, including but not limited to:

• keyboard shortcuts
• writing equations in tex mode and then converting them
• transformation of equations from “normal” to “linear” mode (the one you can use in your programs, you know a = b / c, etc.)
• Patterns
• no latex. I can focus on the material, not the letter

Answer 9

Word with MS Equation for math sections.

Answer 10

I like DocBook and use FOP to create PDF files.

Answer 11

I use reStructuredText because it can be used in Trac , converted to PDF and HTML, have a little overhead and look nice in a simple way.

Answer 12

My suggestion is to use Authorea .

As a former postdoc (astrophysics) and Ph.D. (Computer science) with more than 12 years of research experience (Harvard, CERN, UCLA), I wrote technical documents for a long time. I loved and hated LaTeX. For the past two years, I have worked with friends and colleagues in developing the next generation platform for collaborating on technical / research documents. This is called Authorea. From a technical point of view, Authorea is built on Git and takes LaTeX, Markdown, HTML (even JS to include d3.js fantasies in your documents). Bonus: you do not need to know LaTeX (or any other format), but you can easily add equations, tables, quotes and data to your documents. I hope you find this helpful.

Answer 13

Microsoft Word is considered the editor of standard market standards.