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by db65edfc7996 1658 days ago
Never written a book, but I have written a few reports in Latex, and I would say it is a miserable experience. Slow build times, horrible error messages, and so much markup for everything.

I have taken the stance that all writing should happen in Markdown/Asciidoc/Pandoc/whatever minimal flavor you like and once content is complete, then port everything to Latex if necessary. Pandoc can spit out a reasonable .tex file you can then massage into a final product.

2 comments

I never wrote a book, but I wrote my dissertations (100+ pages each), resumes or any other article in Latex, using Miktex. It wasn't the best experience UI-wise and until I learned proper Latex (which I now have forgotten) the error messages were shit. But the build times with quick builds and splitting stuff in chapters was actually a great experience for me. Maybe it's 'rosy retrospection' or I've been out of the loop with the current happenings in typesetting but if tomorrow I need to start writing a technical book, I'd still pick Latex.
I've used Lyx to create Latex output. It was very nice.