Have you written any long documents or a book with LyX? Any recommendations on resources for learning LyX or LaTeX? There are a lot of Markdown-based publishing tools being promoted these days.

Honestly, if you can use Word or LibreOffice, you can already use LyX. It's that easy. I have one short free work published, and a couple of unpublished works still in production, and I've also used it to generate documentation for some of my other works (though sadly, HTML output is pretty basic, nothing up to par with Matthew's Pollen or Racket Scribble). I think the aforementioned short work is probably a good enough sample of what you can get up to with the most minimal of effort or know-how in LyX: https://github.com/jarcane/bedroom-wall-press/blob/master/RO...

As for the LaTeX underneath, well, I've seldom needed to muck with it. LyX abstracts out a lot of the undercarriage and lets me get on with things in a more GUI-friendly way, though the fallback is always there if I need it (usually just a few extra tags here and there). If I were doing more custom template work though, I probably would need to dig more into LaTeX proper.

Back in my days in academia, I used LaTeX for math and physics. I liked that LaTeX separated out formatting of content from the display. It made it easier for me to focus on the getting the ideas and wording right and someone else worried about producing nice looking templates.

Since then, I have switched over to Markdown for most of writing. There are still ways to embed LaTeX when needed for equations, but without the added complexity of full LaTeX.

What are you using to embed LaTeX?

I've used pandoc to embed LaTeX equations in markdown.

LaTeX is indeed fearsomely powerful but I think it depends on what type of document you are writing. Lots of math, complicated symbols, graphs etc? LaTeX.

Blogging? There are a approximately a billion choices, but lately I have been playing around with Scrivener. It is a little overkill for a blog entry, but it is one of the few programs to not treat a computer as just a typewritter with more fancy font, spellcheck and better correction - instead it allows your to sorta weave your story together, piece by piece.

Certainly I wouldn't use it for blogging (as I said, the default HTML output is pretty spartan), for that I have Frog, which I mostly just tweaked a little bit with a custom Bootstrap template.

The bulk of my writing though has traditionally long-form (I'm not great at maintaining a single-interest blog, and social networks are better for personal musings most times), and for that I don't think I'd use anything else but LyX, especially if I were self-publishing (which I generally have been).

I am writing a short stories book (as an amateur), I was looking for a better tool than Word (not that I can't write in it, just that I don't feel confortable in it). I followed your passionate comment and I am installing LyX right now, after getting assured that you can also use LyX to create a letter or a novel or a theatre play or film script.

Thanks for the comment

I'm not sure I could even list all the authoring tools I've used, which includes writing a few college papers in nroff. I'd mostly stuck with straight text and graduated to HTML (the lingua franca of the Web) in the late 1990s. I actually got stymied on Lyx with some of its insistence on specific structures for documents and fighting those.

In the past year or two I actually took out my copy of the Lion Book and sorted out what I'd been missing with LaTeX. I realized that a decent set of templates was much of the issue, and now have a basic book and article template that I use for most of my work. And while futzing with specifics of layout can keep you from a final output, it won't stop you from writing. And that's the key problem most of the time.

I've also been exploring Markdown (thanks to reddit, Ello, Diaspora, and numerous other sites which rely on it), and Pandoc, which is nowhere short of amazing and astounding.

More often than I care to admit I'll take content from a website and either reduce it to its HTML core or, with depressing frequency, straight ASCII text, add back some light Markdown, and present it as PDF for reading. Web design has gotten that freaking annoying.

On the Medium discussion -- I find the site pretty good, actually, and disagree with the arguments Butterick raises against its minimalism. Good design is light design, and Medium is among the most minimally re-styled sites I visit. Changes?

    .highlightMenu { display: none; }
    .metabar--affixed { position: static; }
    .metabar--bottom { position: static; }
    .notesMarker { display: none; }
    .postContent { color: black; font-weight: normal; } 

Virtually none, by my standards.

Mind that I don't publish on Medium (at least, not yet). Though I've considered it.

As for "typewriter habits", among the advantages of the typewriter -- as a composing interface -- is that it simplifies input. Tools such as LaTeX then perform the job of transforming typewriter input into typographic output. Most often with very minimal additional directives from the author. Tools such as Markdown reduce that still further.

Two spaces after a full stop? Absolutely. Why? Because in my typography it helps me to distinguish between stops following abbreviations and sentences. Which is a useful thing. Mr. Brown. The first stop terminates an abbreviation. The second an entire sentence. About the only of the conventions that I need to consciously apply is ``quotes'' around quoted passages, though search-and-replace of "straight quotes" is actually pretty easily accomplished with some regex magick. Markdown removes the need entirely.