[Tex/LaTex] visual editor for LaTeX that allows for graphical editing of the layout elements (like margins, headers etc)

editors

Background: I have used LaTeX quite a bit back in the uni but haven't really needed the power of mathematical notation as much since I moved on to do biomedical research. It's significantly easier for me and my colleagues to work with more traditional text editors for manuscripts, that play better with reference managers etc.

That being said, I am keen on replacing Powerpoint with something easier and significantly more intelligent. I have gotten the tip to try out LaTeX for presentations and posters but I recall that placing elements and doing visually pleasing work on LaTeX is notoriously complicated. I remember the frustration I had when I was fine tuning the formatting of my masters thesis.

Thus I wonder if there is a visual editor for LaTeX that supports visual editing of elements, such as margins, placement of headers etc. I frequently use Adobe InDesign for posters and pdf documents (like HOWTOs) and I think it would be pretty cool to have the flexibility to manually and visually edit the layout. Does such an editor exist for Mac OS X or Linux? I have checked quite a few WYSIWYG editors but most of those seem to be aiming at minimizing the verbosity of short commands like making text boldface, italic etc. Which is all nice but enough to facilitate the "design" process of the document.

Best Answer

Kaveh Bazargan at River Valley Technologies made an attempt at something like this with a program called Batch Commander. He presented it at TUG 2010, and Ricardo Lafuente had a presentation at the Libre Graphics Meeting also in 2010. The videos are available online:

The program can be found at Ricardo's BitBucket page: https://bitbucket.org/rlafuente/batchcommander