[jnurmine]

Give LyX (https://www.lyx.org/) a try. It has a TeX/LaTeX backend and a handy UI.

Check a tutorial for the basic workflow and you are all set.

Many people have used it and still use it for their books, theses and such. I wrote my thesis with it back in the days. The best part was to be able to just focus on the writing, not formatting.

There is a layout mimicing the layout used by Edward Tufte in his books. That layout is awesomely readable (a highly subjective observation, I know).

[lurquer]

>The best part was to be able to just focus on the writing, not formatting.

I see this 'slogan' frequently when it comes to Tex-based editors. (I realize you are talking about a GUI interface that only uses Tex as its backend... comment isnt really directed to you.)

Is the slogan really true? Perhaps I'm just easily distracted, but I find the exact opposite is true. I spend 1% of the time drafting, and 99% of the time fiddling with Tex, loading packages to make a cool kind of ligature, then ending up reading about the history of ligatures, then writing my own package to create a ligature more consistent with those used in 17th century upper Bavaria, then adding more features to the package to account for monospaced fonts, etc... and finally, at around 4:00 am, I realize I've only written a single sentence.

Maybe it's just me... but the slogan seems like something an alcoholic in denial would say.

[jnurmine]

In my experience it is true; of course some areas may require more detail and attention and tweaking and summoning the Evil Red Text in LyX.

In your case, it seems you are not really writing the text... You are making cosmetic adjustments. And it is fine but it should not be done up front, IMO. As for ligatures, TeX should handle ligatures automagically, but I took that as a general point and yeah, I agree -- one can always find things to tweak.

Process-wise, it is better to "just write". Most of the cosmetics is taken care of by LyX with minimal effort. Add a comment for something to check later. Make the process iterative, if you try to write each line as production quality from scratch, I doubt you will ever finish.

[lurquer]

I was being a bit facetious. I just know I'm not the only person out there who WASTES an enormous amount of time fiddling with LaTeX instead of working.

For pure composition, you are certainly correct... do not write in the Tex editor... Just compose with WORD or something, and then take care of the formatting in Tex at the end.

(Regrettably, though, I am involved in several projects where the composition necessarily has to be in the LaTeX editor as the format and cosmetic adjustments are very important.)

It seems a lot of the helpful questions and answers on the various LaTeX websites come from some PhD student working on his dissertation. I kind of smile with sympathy at their earnest questions about how to print an equation upside-down and backwards in a table cell while using multicolumn (just a silly example...) I know whoever was writing the question was, like me, surfing the internet and focusing on formatting instead of getting back to work and finishing the damn dissertation.