#linux

LaTeX

@myrtti I was pretty sure about your choice (geeky indeed...) :-)

if only word processor, then maybe abiword. :) for rest openoffice.

Random ascii-editor is almost all I need. Using mostly Kate, Nano and Jed, but rarely it's necessary to use OO.org

Vim (and occasionally Notepad) to create HTML files

As i am given MS Windows at work, and it is faster and easier to hand code HTML than to fight the MS Word "layout engine".

Most of the documents i create only need basic HMTL tags (headings, bold, italic, simple tables, a few lists, inserted diagrams), and once created i can send an MHT file so i know that the person on the other end can open and read it.

OOo (or better yet Go-OO.org), then gedit, then nano.

If I'm writing a paper, for class or something, I end up in gedit 98% of the time. Otherwise, I'm split between OOo and Google Docs.

Markdown for pretty much anything.

OOo here

Mostly Google Docs. And if I need to print something I use Ooo.

@ymb: I think I've told you (or was it @alexleonard) that it really would be worth trouble learning LaTeX. I've not been happier after I taught it to myself, the brilliance of it is that I can generate pdfs and html and god knows what formats from LaTeX without compromising anything.

Of course this is highly dependent on what kind of text you are writing. I finished my thesis with LaTeX and find it superior in academic publishing (mainly because of the ingenious BibTeX system). Learning it took a little while but it's definitely worth the trouble. For any other purpose, I would probably use oOo for Mac (even if it still has tons of annoying bugs)

In order of use frequency: TextWrangler, jed, InDesign, OpenOffice, Xemacs.

For plain text - that is, most of my needs: ViM or a personal MediaWiki. For serious stuff with typographic requirements: LaTeX. For an occasional quick document with nasty formatting: OpenOffice. For rtf (as some people only seem to know how to open a file if it goes to Word automatically): GDocs (even though I believe there's a LaTeX to rtf converter).

@myrtti if we did talk about this i don't specifically remember (my poor memeory is only getting worse).

I never bothered with LaTeX as the extra effort over basic HTML (or Markdown) is not needed for me. This is probably the same reason i have not made much progress with CSS :)

@TomiS, BibTeX rocks, yes. But I was really suprised to see this week that RefWorks, <a helper application the name of which I have forgot> and Word can be put together so that the result is semi-usable. And, RefWorks imports and exports BibTeX. However, it's proprietary and non-free beer.

I'm sure there are loads of other, possibly free tools that do the same.

Yes, this is highly offtopic. Sorry.

LaTeX (with BibTeX and Emacs) for longer documents, OpenOffice, or sometimes Word, for a page or two.

@samposm ..Word? With Wine, or on that curious operating system... wait, I do not remember the name...

Sorry, just kidding ;-)

@mcastel Yes, when coauthoring documents with people who use Word, I boot my machine to Windows and use Word. Haven't tried Word under Wine, just heard some rumors that it might occasionally crash.

@samspon is it still much better than Openoffice (I do not know it very well) ? I think it's detectably faster, to say on thing, or am I wrong?

@mcastel Well I don't use Word or OpenOffice very much, so I can't really make a very educated comparison. But with more complex Word documents I am just a bit scared that OpenOffice might break something. So if I have to edit (a more complex) document and send it back to someone who used Word, I feel it's safer to use Word myself as well.

@samposm it seems completely reasonable. One cannot deny that the strength of Word is the huge user base - and OO cannot (still?) provide full compatibility with complex documents, for what I know...