Hi,
I'm returning to graduate study after a few years out in the workplace. I'm a bit rusty on what good stuff there is out there for academic writing, and after a bit of research I've come up with: ConTeXt, LaTeX or an XML dtd (tbook or DocBook?) plus appropriate tools. I'm ruling out Word (having wrestled with it at work), and am reluctant to use anything similar like OpenOffice. I have used LaTeX for some things in the past. There will a little maths in my writing, but it's not central.
Here are my main criteria for choice, in order of priority:
1) future-proofing. ie. I want my text to be always available to me forever, or until I die, whichever comes first. I take this to mean that I want the canonical form of my documents to be plain text of some sort. It also means that the system needs to be widely-used enough that it will be translateable into essential future formats as they arise.
2) semantic rather than layout-oriented markup as much as possible. I'm impatient with, and marginally interested in, layout. I'm very interested in what my text means. As much as possible, I want to set up my layouts early in the piece, and never think about them again.
3) relatively easy integration with some form of bibliographic database(ish) system (bibtex would do).
4) ability to produce pdf's, html, and rtf versions (for interoperation with Word-users) at least.
5) no need for me to write any code. I used to be a programmer, and when I left, promised myself, my wife, and my cat that I would never write a line of code again. I don't mind a bit of TeXish fiddling if *absolutely* necessary.
ConTeXt seems to fit the bill for 1,3 and 5. I'm not sure about 4 (html? rtf?) or 2 (I haven't had a proper look at the nature of the available macros yet) .
Would anyone with 1st hand knowledge of writing in academia care to comment either on the above or your own reasons for your choice of tools? I am doing my own research on all this stuff, but I know that until I get into the fray, there will be things I haven't thought of.
Cheers,
CB.
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