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by cben 3334 days ago
I wonder: did you spend much of this time on math formulas, or on "regular" typography like lists & headings? TeX math notation is the pretty much only game in town, and worth learning, but there are many ways to skip/ease the rest, might help your learning curve:

- WYSIWYG with TeX math: Dropbox paper lets you press $$, type formula, press Enter; and I shudder to suggest it but I hear modern Word more or lets you type TeX math [https://superuser.com/a/509805/33415].

- WYSIWYM: Lyx, https://www.fiduswriter.org/, http://www.texts.io/

- Markdown with TeX math: there is alas no single standard syntax but tons of tools do support it: https://github.com/cben/mathdown/wiki/math-in-markdown For conversion Pandoc is king, infinitely flexible, and can render through LaTeX, HTML or many other ways.

* Markdown is unbtrusive enough that styling it in-place gives you a form of WYSIWYG. Several editors doing this (plus rendering formulas in-place): StackEdit, Typora, https://www.gitbook.com/editor, Atom with https://atom.io/packages/preview-inline (see also https://discuss.atom.io/t/19222), http://markdownnotes.com/, and my own https://mathdown.net

- https://overleaf.com similarly has "rich text mode" that styles LaTeX source and renders formulas in-place. [https://www.overleaf.com/blog/81]

- Other lightweights markups: there are too many, notably reStructuredText, asciidoc are popular and powerful. But I'd start with Markdown.

I'm genuinely interested to hear your experiences if you try any of these...