Typesetting

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Most digital editors you are used to directly show the changes you make. That kind of editor is called a WYSIWYG-editor; a What You See Is What You Get editor.

Compare that to editors where you write and do not directly see the result; for example LaTeX for writing. When you are used to seeing the changes instantly, you may also apply this mindset to LaTeX. Then you are the equivalent of a F5-spamming monkey, when it is not really needed.

Are you really productive when you keep waiting for it to compile on every minor change? When do you see the pattern of your change, and will you trust that it will give the output that it should?

Take for example this document I was typesetting:

ecce_romani_ch1_and_2.png

Figure 1: The first two Latin stories of the book Ecce Romani

As you can see in the text, there is custom typesetting for the titles and the start of the paragraphs. But I would not need to recompile for every diacritic I would add. Still, I did this in the beginning, as I was so used to needing to see the result before I trusted it.