The relationship of LaTeX to outliner software

 The LaTeX software is known as a powerful typesetting program used since decades for creating academic writing. From an outside perspective the LaTeX community prefer it's own program over potential alternatives like Framemaker or MS-Word. But the community struggles in explaining the reason why. How can it be, that a complex software like LaTeX which contains of thousands of macros has found so many advocates?

The reason is not located in the software itself but with the workflow in which LaTeX makes sense. What the average student, researcher or book author is doing can be summarized in the following workflow:

1. makes notes in an outliner

2. aggregate the notes into prose text

3. convert the prose text into a readable pdf paper

This workflow divides the task into two subtasks: creating the text and rendering the text. And both tasks can be realized with different software packages. There are on the one hand programs available for creating an outline which are Omnioutliner, a text editor or the notecase software. And on the other hand there is software available for converting the text into a pdf document.

Let us imagine how the workflow can be mastered without the famous LaTeX software in the loop. First step is to create the outline with a program like notecase which is an open source outliner for Linux. And then the text gets exported into the markdown format and converted in to a pdf paper.

This workflow comes close to what LaTeX users are doing with their software. They are using two different programs for the workflow. A typical combination is to combine the emacs editor for creating the outline, and the pdftex backend for creating the pdf file. Another frequently used combination is to use the texniccenter editor as the editor and the luatex engine for creating the pdf file.

The interesting situation is, that an outliner software doesn't need a preview how the text will be shown in the pdf format. During the outline subtask, the user doesn't care about the size of the font, or if the output is rendered in one column or twocolumn. This missing capabilitites of an outliner software is described by the latex community as an advantage. And they are right. The outline of a text which contains of sections, subsections, intext references and bibliograühic references has enough complexity. There is no need to render the information like it will be printed later.

Even if somebody doesn't prefer the latex software, the chance is high that he will use a divided workflow which contains of creating the text and formatting the text. Or let me explain it the situation from a different perspective. Classical WYSIWYG software like MS-Word, indesign or scribus are a poor choice if the idea is to use them as outliner tools. In theory it is possible, but this is not the purpose of these programs.

Perhaps we have to a go a step backward and answer the question what desktop publishing is in general? Has it something to do with printing out a text or rendering the text in the pdf format? No, the core task is to create the text in an outliner software. The interesting situation is, that the LaTeX program wasn't designed as an outliner software, but latex assumes that the outline is provided as input. That means, the user needs the structured text, and then he can run the latex program.