Also having a formal GD background, I tend to do the same... Trying get things like type polished enough for proper design work without using a graphical editor is a fool's errand. Depending on the use case, I often end up using the results inline. That way, I can easily modify/animate/script it with my code editor without having to jump back-and-forth between environments, and things like element IDs stay consistent.
Had to do quite a bit of work to get filesizes down to something reasonable for:
http://shapeoko.github.io/Docs/
One late development was working up a mechanism where an image could be clicked on to open it in a new window:
http://shapeoko.github.io/Docs/content/tPictures/PS20028-100...
and then the part names in the parts list could be clicked on to highlight the matching part in the diagram.