Bye formatting days!
Microsoft Word is not my favorite tool for formatting documents and to get the formatting right for Word is a bloody headache. Numerous highlighting and assigning a certain style to it and footnotes, table of contents and references – I should be thinking about the content not how it looks!
I have found my savior! LaTeX! I know its such an 80s software but after exploring for the last 6 hours, I am convinced this is the tool I will use in future. LaTeX is pretty confusing and I must admit and I am still abit lost. There is MiKTeX, ProTeXt, TeXnixCenter, GhostScript, GhostGum in the initial installer, then for my personal purposes, I added, LyX and JabRef. I read a 20 odd page introduction and started hammering (read: typing) an article I am writing at the moment into LyX. If it was a title, I just clicked “Chapter”, if it was a section, then i clicked “section”. I also added like footnotes, bibliography, table of contents and some math formula. It was easy. I just concentrated on my content. Once I was done, I click “View PDF” and I got a perfectly formatted PDF.
Now I know why even my young lecturers back in University days were using LaTeX, its a really good program. I am now an official convert. I believe my Microsoft Word days will decrease dramatically from now on – sweet!
paul said,
haha nice, see I knew you will be a convert the moment you start using it.
It helped me a great deal back in my uni days not only on the structure of the document, but also the maths formulas. Keeping in mind at the time we were using Word 6 and MS Equation Editor 2.0. You get the picture it was a PAIN.
LaTeX never once failed on rendering beautiful maths equations, no matter how involved it got
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