Ask HN: MS Word alternatives for writing academic reports

22 points

12 years ago

Right now i am searching for an alternative for writing academic reports (master thesis). in the past i have written such reports (bachelor final projects) with MS Word and it is NOT an enjoyable experience. Whereas latex is widely used for academic reports, i don't really want to learn something so complex only for academic reports, i want to learn something that also can be used for general usage (documentation, blog writing, etc).

Here i found out about restructuredtext and markdown as a markup language for documentation. After some reading i concluded that restructuredtext is more in tune with what i am trying to accomplish e.g: it can be converted into latex if i want to incorporate bibliography from latex

What are your experiences on using markup language for writing general or academic documents(using figures, tables, bibliography, etc)? do you have suggestions regarding this topic?

PS: I mainly using linux

amd Here are some applications for writing markup language that i found:

https://notex.ch/ (rst, markup, latex) -- it seems to be made with GWT

http://rst.ninjs.org/ (rst)

https://github.com/github/markup (many)

http://sourceforge.net/projects/retext/

edit:

i agree with the expression "when you have a hammer, you see every problem as a nail" as stated by commenters.

but right now i am not proficient enough with a tool to switch or compare with another one.

some commenter suggest that i really invest in learning latex. i was starting to learn latex from wikipedia wikibook when i got intimidated by it and went to searching for alternatives.

based on the commenters some ways/applications to ease this learning are:

1. lyx

2. www.writelatex.com

3. using latex templates

4. scrivener

any other suggestions?

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