How do you people fulfill your text processing needs?

More specifically: how do you:

• Write documents?
• Keep notes?
• Create presentations (slides)?

These days I mostly write in markdown, and either keep what I write somewhere online (the wiki), or I convert it to LaTeX, and do a bit of fine-tuning if need be. This is handled gracefully by either ikiwiki (which I see mostly as a tool for adding linking and structure to already existent documents, which are intended to be online) or by pandoc, which does the markdown->LaTeX conversion.

I also use the approach described above to handle long documents, which span through several files. Pandoc lets you concatenate several markdown files and outputs a single document, with a proper heading. And LaTeX has \include, \input and \subfiles to cover those cases.

If I need more control over the layout, write math, or any other advanced stuff in the document, I write it using LaTeX. Or I abuse markdown and embed HTML in the markdown code.

Most of the note-taking is done using ikiwiki, or The Vim Outliner.

Regarding slides, I also use LaTeX for that; I create them with the beamer package.

The documents written for any of these tools (markdown/ikiwiki, vim OTL, LaTeX) can be put under version control easily (Git), and since both of them are plain text, even merging different versions and collaborating is a non-issue, provided the collaborator knows a bit of version control.

What do you do, and how do you solve these problems:

• Version control/group collaboration
• Advanced formatting/math
• Generation of online (HTML) and printable (PDF) outputs of the document
• Create one document from several others (say, put together a book when having one chapter per file).

I'm waiting for your comments.

I thought I was checking properly for comments that needed moderation in this blog. Turns out, I wasn't, since they were being placed, not where I was looking for them, but somewhere else. 9000+ comments pending moderation.

So, dear readers: if you commented on some post here, and the damn post didn't show up once you sent it, you: 1) are entitled to slap me in the back of my head when you see me again, and 2) are encouraged to check for answers to your comments in the posts you made them.

Just to help you, these are the posts that had "lost in moderation hell" comments:

• testing the empathy chip on jerojasro-bot
• mesa para laptop
• at mrs ritas school
• every time you use arrow keys
• moby dick

Sorry about that, will hopefully not happen again