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On more than one occasion I have started writing a paper draft in Sublime + Markdown because the scaffolding of LaTeX felt too distracting.

Eventually you need to actually build the real document though.



Export from Emacs org mode to LaTeX. org mode offers plenty of flexibility to tweak the final output and lets you focus on writing.

Edit: and creating tables in org mode is _so_ much better than in plain LaTeX. If you find yourself manually working on tables, the Emacs + org mode combo is worth investing time in.


Discovering the table support in org-mode was huge for me, wish I’d known about it decades ago.


What's the missing feature that has your going back to latex?

I switched to markdown and sublime a while ago. No more sideways tables, true. But even for that there is a workaround. And much less distraction in return.


I've just worked with LaTeX for a long time and know all the tricks to make it do exactly what I want. Equations, figures, tables, cross-references... I can get it all to work on the page. And some of my collaborators still print things out, so using the tricks to get a good-looking PDF is still worth the trouble to me.

When I want to get my rough, fluid thoughts onto a page, it's going to be easiest in Markdown + Sublime. But once the story and structure is basically there, the final product is easiest to achieve in LaTeX.


You may like Texmacs.


https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/welcome.en.html

Note that despite the name, TeXmacs is not an extension to emacs, but is its own standalone system.


It's also not based on TeX, just inspired by it.




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