When I’m just trying to write prose, technical or otherwise, the bells and whistles of a word processor just get in the way. In school I used LaTeX, but the most straightforward way of getting it today appears to be MacTeX, which at 2.3G is heavyweight for simply marking up some text to publish online.

Markdown solves this problem for me, offline with Pandoc and some CSS themes. Online, this handy plugin lets me post in markdown, and appears to avoid the round-tripping problem by saving the markdown source separately from the generated html. BasicTeX is a smaller TeX distribution for the Mac that lacks a front-end, but has the command line tools needed for Pandoc to output PDF.

Marked up plain text documents are very easy to store and to diff. I have a Git repository I access over SSH where I store document templates, as well as long-lived documents such as my résumé.

Preview.app allows PDF files to be combined using drag and drop, but it’s very fiddly, and if you get it wrong, it won’t work. It’s especially tedious when you have many files to combine, for example an expense report where you have separate scans for your receipts, but you need to submit them as a single PDF. http://gotofritz.net/blog/howto/joining-pdf-files-in-os-x-from-the-command-line/ shows that Automator remains useful. You can either make an automator application or folder action that allows PDF files to be combined, or you can use the command line.