: Re: Do Writers Use LaTex/TeX for writing? I'm quite interested in the LaTex/TeX system and am wondering if any other fellow writers use it frequently to write in.

@Jamie945

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Matter of opinion and all that, but I prefer plain text with no formatting.

Writing and typesetting are separate activities that are not relevant to each other. When you're writing a story your focus should be the characters and the story, not what font you're using or whether your chapter titles should be centered. If you get wrapped up in text formatting while you're writing it's a distraction.

It can also be a trap. You can get into a thing of turning the formatting decisions into a major part of your creative effort. Then you might want to express something -- a mood, an atmosphere, an emotion -- and you'll slip up and express it using formatting rather than words because in that moment the formatting happens to be easier somehow, or more appealing.

I just stick with .txt. Of couse that means I can't use bold or italic. But C.S. Lewis said (somewhere) that a good writer has ways of indicating bold or italic using word choice and sentence structure.

This is regarding fiction -- if you're writing a scientific paper with equations that's another story.

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