The price of WYSIWYG

Last week, I worked quite a bit in LaTeX. It is surely the way to go if you want to write a technical paper and sometimes I wonder why I shied away from it for such a long time. It produces high quality documents and has extensive support for typesetting mathematical formulas. One of the things that has bugged me is the lack of WYSIWYG for mathematical content. You have to compile your source files to see what the formulas are going to look like. Or do you?

If you are an emacs user like me, waste no time and start using (if you already aren't) AUCTEX. There are a few things you have to learn to get up to speed but the returns are phenomenal. You no longer need to compile the entire document, you can simply preview it within Emacs, all figures and mathematical formulas get rendered right inside the emacs buffer. I almost went through a whole day of typing without compiling the source. The preview feature is simply amazing.

Another thing I worked on was a presentation, and lo and behold, I prepared it in LaTeX using beamer. I spent almost two hours trying to work through WYSIWYG annoyances in Apple's Keynote and eventually gave up. Here are some of the things that bugged the crap out of me.

• I don't like to use the mouse to align content, it's just not the right approach. I should be able to type at a meta level, simplify specify what type of content I am working on and the software should take care of the alignment and the formatting.
  
• Keynote has a nice feature that you can simply cut out formulas from an existing PDF and paste them onto your slides. They retain their vectorized representation! However, if you need to resize things, it's just so hard to ensure that everything remains consistent.
• When there is a lot of content, the mouse just becomes an obstacle. In emacs, I can just focus on typing up my content, both the actual presentation content and the meta information such as formatting, themes, colors etc. I rarely need to use the mouse, things just flow along nicely. Try doing that in Keynote or Powerpoint.