Quantum Forest

Last night I was helping my wife to fix an MS Word document. The document had been edited by several people, with varying setups, so it was a real mess. Different page sizes (letter and A4), paragraph settings, sections, etc. Making changes at any point of the document created all sort of side effects; for example, content moving to different pages or missing formating when deleting supposedly unrelated sections. At the end, she copied and ‘pasted unformatted’ to another document to be able to fix the document from scratch. The always touted advantage of electronic documents comes down in flames when one needs to resort to such basic fix. Better than typing everything again, but still unacceptable as a proper solution.

In contrast, I have been again enjoying the chance of writing some fairly long documents by myself; that is, with no co-authors. While writing a review paper I can go back to a LaTeX document that I wrote back in 2001. I copied the useful parts–mostly long equations and a couple of paragraphs–and pasted it in my new document. The style will be taken care by the article class (or even the memoir class if I were feeling fancy).

When working in solitary mode I now default to LaTeX. My only change this year was to move from compiling documents with XeLaTeX instead of LaTeX. Reasons? Easy access to my system fonts and full use of unicode, so I can write with whatever characters I prefer. My current setup is documented here.

The only big choice comes to whatever text editing system one prefers. I have done most of my writing during the last two years in TexShop, which is excellent. Nevertheless, I used Aquamacs in a project (just for the sake of it) and there was and old fashion setting that I really liked: automatic flow hard wrapping to a fixed column. This created a neat and easy to read file, which was independent of window size (in contrast to soft wrapping). The drawback is that emacs is a monster program and so much mac-unlike that it is really hard for me to find my way around all the options (and, god, there is an awful lot of options).

My geeky side does enjoy trying editors, and at night time, I tested most of the editors listed in here, from a LaTeX editing viewpoint. My finalists were TexShop, Aquamacs and Textmate. The latter is pure macness and works beautifully; it evens automatically detects documents that require XeLaTeX based on regular expressions. The compilation window is beautiful as well, and it even supports basic code folding for documents (although why folding of sections is not supported is beyond me). The question would be if folding justifies 39 euros… Well, it could be a nice Christmas gift to myself.

P.S. 2008-12-19: I did buy a copy of Textmate, with 15% academic discount.