I'd rather not use libreoffice and the thought of running msword on wine gives me a headache.

What do you guys use for word processing?
Preferably a cli program.
Wordgrinder looked nice but lacks features.
Am I missing something?

For scientific papers and reports i use latex, for the rest googledocs and plaintext.
If you want cli i guess you can try markdown with your editor of choice for simpler tasks.

Vim, Markdown, Pandoc and Make. Its got all your needs :). For the scientific papers LATEX is the way to go.

As already recommended, LaTeX for "large" documents: Scientific stuff, letters, job applications, ... When I need graphs/charts/figures, I either use Inkscape to create SVGs or tikz.

For "smaller" documents or slides, groff is nice, too. Especially grotty, the driver for terminals, comes in handy when you need to output "plain text". I also use groff to write those short notes in my gopher hole ("twitpher").

Markdown + pandoc sounds intriguing. I've only recently started to use Markdown on a regular basis.

Of course, none of those options are WYSIWYG. Are you looking for something like that? If I remember correctly, MS Word for DOS was ... kind of ... like ... WYSIWYG. I've never seen something like that in the modern Linux/BSD world.

(13-07-2015, 02:52 PM)vain Wrote: I either use Inkscape to create SVGs or tikz

check out IPE, it's awesome for making figures.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/ipe7/

You could use sunlime text? or emacs might have a plug in..

(13-07-2015, 03:19 PM)jvarg Wrote: check out IPE, it's awesome for making figures.

Oh, that looks very interesting. Why have I never heard of it before? Thank you!

my wife writes for a living. i installed every word processor i could find and she chose abiword.

i personally do all my editing in vim, be it code, word processing, etc

I do documentation in Emacs using org-mode, then export to LaTeX and PDF

There is Ted, the GNU processor too

I like the the WPS Office programs, but that's a non-free program.

<p><h1>About markdown</h1>
</p>
<p>Markdown is great as it is ubiquitous, and there are dozen of parsers for it. What I prefer about it is its readability even without conversion. I read it as source rather than html.</p>
<h2>Folks behinnd it</h2>
<ul>
<li>Aaron Swartz. RIP</li>
<li>John Gruber</li>
</ul>
<h2>Pandoc</h2>
<p>I think that it is possible to make a large project fully in markdown thank to <strong>pandoc</strong>, as there are many, many extensions for it. If I remember correctly, pandoc ususe its own markdown format internally to convert any document, so it may writing pandoc markdown may permit to do whatever pandoc can, which is quite everything.</p>
<h2>Many outputs</h2>
<p>For basic figures, plain text files may be enough, as you may see in gopher://z3bra.org.</p>
<p>Pandoc. It can then be used as a base to write quite everything, as it is very easy to write.</p>
<h2>Pretty as plain text too</h2>
<p>Tool for viewing markdown in terminal, by converting it to man pages or such:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://github.com/tj/mad">mad</a> (bash and perl based) and the newer <a href="http://tldr-pages.github.io/">tldr</a> that break the fronters between markdown and man pages.</li>
<li><a href="https://rtomayko.github.io/ronn/ronn.1.html">ronn</a></li>
<li><a href="https://github.com/visit1985/mdp">mdp</a> to use markdown-like syntax to make presentations in the terminal.</li>
<li><code>less</code>. Seryously not a problem. It has a search function. Even in tty it is pleasant to read markdown with <a href="https://github.com/talamus/solarize-12x29-psf">this font</a> and with a <a href="https://github.com/sshbio/dot/blob/d5b6ecb0a8d75a54815548288bb86dfd078194bc/.profile#L109">tty theme</a>.</li>
</ul>
<p><img src="http://pub.iotek.org/p/MhEoX8y.png" alt="less + tty + nothing, just... nothing more. properly configured, that's it" /></p>
<p>See? Even without a root access, with a single print call and a .psf font, you will be able to review any markdown document in a way that looks quite good.</p>
<p>And markdown cuses both setext and atx heading permining you this setup (<a href="">and not set up am I right</a>):</p>
<ul>
<li>Document titles double underlined</li>
<li>H2 (first actual heading) being underlined, with any length.</li>
<li>Others with multiple <code>#</code> before.</li>
</ul>
<p>This looks just like any wikipedia default style!</p>
<h2>Sane format</h2>
<p>Have you ever opened a .docx archive and discovered the file with the content? The last time I checked, it was a single line of <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags">XML</a>. I do not want to check one more time.</p>
<p>Markdown syntax depend on the converter you use, and there are many implementation. But the <a href="https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/">original guide</a> outlines how simple the syntax and how laziness (or writing on a hurry) is not a problem to write valid markdown format. <a href="http://commonmark.org/">CommonMark</a> is an initiative to provide a real stardard.</p>
<p>There are also tools like <a href="https://github.com/mrcoles/readmd">readmd</a> to pretty-format valid but ugly markdown files. I prefer writing valid markdown from the beggining.</p>
<h2>Light setup</h2>
<p>There are many programs on GitHub that convert markdown to html that are no longer that 1000 lines of code.</p>
<ul>
<li>In <a href="https://github.com/tfritzon/awkdown">awk</a>;</li>
<li>In <a href="https://github.com/masak/markdown">perl</a>;</li>
<li>In <a href="https://github.com/Gottox/smu">C</a>, the one I use;</li>
<li>In <a href="https://github.com/tfritzon/awkdown">many</a> <a href="">languages</a> <a href="https://github.com/vmg/redcarpet">libraries</a></li>
<li>Insert many others here!</li>
</ul>

<p>PS: I wrote this in markdown and converted it with smu</p>

(03-04-2016, 10:57 PM)sshbio Wrote: Have you ever opened a .docx archive and discovered the file with the content? The last time I checked, it was a single line of XML. I do not want to check one more time.

Best solution to this issue is:

Good summary of those tools.

What is smu? Markdown to bbcode?
I couldn't find it online.

<code>smu</code> stands for simple markup, and is a converter for markdown-like syntax to html: https://github.com/Gottox/smu

It is written in C with little-to no dependency, but has no extension (tables, etc.).

It converted the post to html. Maybe harmless html (no javascript, no css, no frame etc) does not get removed from the post and is interpreted as-is.

The problem with .docx is that 'others' consider it standard and send you forms in that format to fill out. Preferably laid out using tables (within tables...) instead of setting tabs. I can tell you from experience that LO consistently screws up such layout.
My own word processing is in (Xe)LaTeX, using texworks and TeXlive students nowadays submit all their work in .docx as well; fortunately with minimal layout. Have never yet had occasion to prepare web content, so no HTML. Never looked into markdown either.

groff plus MOM macros is my go-to for text processing besides the usual (insert lightweight markup syntax here) pipe into pandoc. Never could get LaTeX working on my system.

my wife swears by abiword. i dont do much wordprocessing anymore, i do everything in vim. at work i cheat and use googledocs to read crap my coworkers send me.

I write papers in emacs using nroff-mode, then I just

Been using libreoffice alittle more these days... docx's are a pain but it works okay.

I just use ed or google docs depending on the circumstances

Although, I have set up a script with pandoc and sendmail to send HTML emails using markdown, just because :D

personally i use markdown and google docs when it comes to university stuff where compatibility is a must.

don't even leave markdown for my blog since i use jekyll and it parses the md directly to serve it as html.

+1 For LaTeX for math and scientific papers. I even had a course in university where every assignment had to be handed in, in LaTeX. If I remember correctly, it was theory of computation.

It's been few days I'm focusing on word processing. I have few letters to write (& loooooooot of notes to take) and I was looking for something as CLIsh as possible. Is found this guy's channel, with a ve-ry good video for noobs like me:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh_WGWii7UE

So I decided to go further and looked for an automated way to generate fancy documents. Now I use dirty handmade makefiles and latex template, working in pair with pandoc in order to get a PDF output. Pretty nice. I you guyz have strong experience regarding this kind of method, I'll be happy to know more !

On Windows it's quite easy to find a really great word processing software (WordPerfect to the rescue); but, indeed, on other systems it's hard to find one that doesn't crash 25743 times a day.

I started using Emacs + LaTeX when preparing my thesis quite a while ago, I haven't written a non-LaTeX letter since then. Sadly, at work I have to use Word. Well, jobs don't have to be fun, I presume.

It's interesting to see how irrelevant word processing has been made by digital communication possibilities.

(17-05-2016, 06:23 PM)jkl Wrote: jobs don't have to be fun, I presume.

Your job is the activity that take up the most of your time in a week. If you can, you should find a job you enjoy.

You know, tools may be not as enjoyable as your job, unfortunately.

I noticed that I can't stand doing things I like for money. I lose interest in it easily.
Example: I was a hobby web developer until I was hired as a PHP dev. After coming home, I didn't want to touch anything regarding web development anymore because I didn't like it anymore.

Weird me.

(18-05-2016, 05:41 AM)jkl Wrote: I noticed that I can't stand doing things I like for money. I lose interest in it easily.
Example: I was a hobby web developer until I was hired as a PHP dev. After coming home, I didn't want to touch anything regarding web development anymore because I didn't like it anymore.

Weird me.

Maybe you should focus less on the "technology" and more on the ideas and projects.

The technology is, unfortunately, the most interesting thing with being a developer. That's one of the reasons why I try to learn a new language for every new project.