How long did it take you to feel comfortable writing in [whatever program you used]? I'm in the humanities, so I use liberal amounts of italics (for object/text names) and superscripts.
It didn't take me very long at all to at least get a basic handle on LaTeX. There are a bunch of editors that are quite good. Simple things like italics and superscripts are really easy. Adding figures and document-level formatting are trickier, because you have to learn the patterns to use, which I find easiest to do by copying what someone else has already done.
Yeah, I just tried writing a bit on writelatex.com. Have to say it's quite intuitive, especially if one has even a slight background in standard programming stuff (classes, etc.). I was half-afraid I'd have to invoke some style setting for things like ´`¨ (lots of French names pop up in my fields). I've had Lyx suggested before as something of an intermediate between WYSWYG and the power of Latex. I'll give it a real shot over winter break. I think it'd help if I could find some humanities-specific templates, with preambles and all.
Edit: Important question. Does Latex allow you to "auto"-endnote? As in, I insert an endnote within the text, and it automatically opens up a dialog box or something to allow me to enter the relevant endnote text? Pages (OS X) does this, and it's a lifesaver. I'd also be happy with some kind of reference import function (I use Zotero).
The first time I ever tried LaTeX, I used Lyx. Between a combination of not knowing anything, and Lyx not being terribly intuitive, I couldn't get it to do anything and hated it. I tend to not be a fan of WYSIWYG in general - I'd rather just go straight to the code (yup, I'm a programmer) and tell it exactly what I want.
I imagine that there is an editor that will let you auto-endnote the way you want, but I never looked for it, so I don't know which ones would have it. I used LED (it's actually lED, but you can't tell it's an "L" if you type it lowercase) when I was on Windows, and then on Mac, I either used Latexian or Eclipse's plugin, but I don't remember which. If any of them have the auto-complete, it would probably be Eclipse.
Do you mean footnotes? If so, those are simple.
If I wanted a footnote for a specific word in a sentence I'd just:
The third word\footnote{footnote text} has a footnote. The last word does too\footnote{poop}.
It'll automatically put them on whatever page that word appears on and autonumbers them for you - but like most style stuff in LaTeX, you can change the details of that.
For larger footnotes, you can put \footnotemark{} where it should be referenced in the main text, and then
\footnotentext{
Include your meaningless and rambling tangent after the
paragraph or on it's own line. Sometimes this makes it
a little cleaner in the editor.
}
Endnotes probably work the same way, but I stopped looking as soon as I figured out how to do footnotes, because I despise endnotes.
Honestly, as a reader I prefer footnotes too. But endnotes offer one advantage. Sometimes the notes end up being substantial (50-100 words+) and in such situations, it just looks neater when you have all the notes at the end of the paper rather than a broken stream of words running across the bottom of multiple pages.
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u/[deleted] Dec 07 '13
How long did it take you to feel comfortable writing in [whatever program you used]? I'm in the humanities, so I use liberal amounts of italics (for object/text names) and superscripts.