Writing and Formatting Headings

Documentation users rely on headings to quickly locate content of interest, so they should be easily identifiable and provide meaningful context/keywords in a consistent way. Within these golden rules, though, there’s ample room for customisation to reinforce a particular document/provider’s brand. Continue reading “Writing and Formatting Headings”

Doc tools: Overleaf

I’ve been working a lot with LaTeX this year. On my laptop, my preferred toolset is WinEdt and MikTeX, but I’m intrigued by the more portable looking solution of Overleaf.

Overleaf is a web-based LaTeX editor that allows you to store and edit your content in the cloud. You can sign up for a free account if you won’t be using it much, or a monthly subscription to add more projects plus a few extra features.

The site has a good catalog of existing templates you can choose from to start a document, article, presentation, CV, or whatever. They even provide an interactive tutorial to get you up to speed if you’re not too familiar with LaTeX. More advanced users can upload whatever custom/specialised templates and resources they need.

The split-view, web-based editor shows your editable markup on the left hand side, and a dynamic preview of the results on the right hand side. As I’m writing this, there’s a beta RichText view of the sources which shows a bit of a mashup of WYSIWYG and source content depending on which document I’m looking at – I guess it renders what it can parse sufficiently and leaves the rest in its raw format.

The free plan has a limited number of files per project (60), and an overall space limit of 1GB, but you can have as many projects as you like within those constraints, and get almost all the bells and whistles. Also, as seems to be a trend with many cloud-based services, they offer bonus space and features in return for social media interactions, inviting friends, and the like.

If you’re looking for a collaborative/cloud-based solution for your LaTeX project, you’ve little to lose by taking Overleaf for a test drive.

Pandoc

I’m a bit of a junkie for markup languages: I’ve used many, experimented with more, and am always eager to try a new one. Pandoc is a delight of a tool that allows you to convert from one markup language to another. There’s a proper, installable tool you can put on your local machine to handle full files, which will do a whole lot of the work for you, but you’ll still need to do some clean up on the results.
Something I find useful in itself, though, is the Try pandoc online demo. Continue reading “Pandoc”