I've read quite a bit here on the forum about how different members write and edit text on the Mac, and about the possibilities and challenges involved. My own needs aren't extreme, but I often produce documents with simple formatting — different heading levels, italics, bold, paragraphs and so on. At the moment I sometimes use Pages, and sometimes I write in Markdown and convert to .docx with Pandoc before continuing in Pages.
That said, I notice that quite a few people here end up in Windows when working with text, and I'm wondering whether that might be a good idea for me too? Or is it because their needs are more detailed than mine?
I find technology interesting, and I'm always looking for an excuse to try out Parallels and a virtual machine on the Mac to run Windows. Any input on how text editing works better on Windows is very welcome.
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quarto
For tasks similar to yours, I use Quarto, which uses Pandoc under the hood and generates neat HTML, PPT, DocX (a pre-configured document template with styles is required), or PDF files from Markdown or LaTeX written in the TextMate text editor. Incidentally, this setup proved sufficient for me during my first year of undergraduate programming—I didn't even need to touch MS Word or Pages.
As a nice bonus, if you ever need to add graphs, diagrams, or plots to your text, you can easily do so by writing a short snippet of Python or R code directly inside the document. Quarto will execute it and neatly insert the generated image right into the output.