I can usually get programs like Microsoft Word to format my documents so the way I envision the document in my head matches up pretty close to what I end up with on the screen. You know, however, that sometimes getting the document to look right can often take as much time as it takes to type the document in the first place. If you add to that the hassle of trying to get equations for physics or chemistry to show up correctly, it's pretty easy to such down a lot of time simply knocking out a short and simple handout.
Last July, I caught John Burk's post on a new LaTeX1 package that makes writing physics equations much easier. Although I had been peripherally aware of LaTeX in the past, I really didn't know much. Since I had some extra time in the summer (and since I'm not teaching this year, freeing up more time), I decided to jump in and try to figure LaTeX out.
What is LaTeX?
Don't be fooled. LaTeX is not a word processor. It took me awhile to figure that one out. While you type in the text that you want to show up in your final document, you're also adding some code telling it exactly how you want your final document to look. Want a new section in your document? Type section{Section Title}
. This automatically creates a section title with a larger bold font, and automatically adds it to your table of contents (if you have one).
Why bother?
Since I'm sciencey (is that how you spell sciencey?), I tend to use more formulas, symbols, and other weird notations in my documents than the average bear. As previously mentioned, getting these to work in pretty much any standard word processing software sucks. It's a major pain. Especially if there are special characters all over it. Even more so if you want the formulas to actually look right. LaTeX provides simple codes that allow you to make equations and symbols look exactly how you envisioned them in your head.
For example, typing
a=\dfrac{2(\Delta y)}{t^2}
will tell LaTeX to do this:
[latex size=4]a=\dfrac{2(\Delta y)}{t^2}\(\)\LaTeX\(\)\LaTeX$$ to make.
Resources
- LaTeX is free to download. Be warned, it's huge (~1.7 Gb).Update As gasstationwithoutpumps mentions in the comments, you can pick up BasicTeX for a mere 69Mb. It looks like it doesn't come with as many tools as the full LaTeX download, but if disk space is tight, it looks like it'd work just fine.
- John Burk's post on the mandi LaTeX package for physics
- pronounced "lay-tech," which of course makes total sense. [↩]
I think that you might find yourself moving more and more to full LaTeX for documents.
I do all my slides in LaTeX now (using the beamer package).
There is a smaller download of LaTeX available for the Macs, the BasicTex package, which only runs to 69Mbytes. It has everything you need except a text editor, but there are several of those already available.
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Good tip on BasicTex. I updated the post with that information as well.
I'm not sure I'd use LaTeX for full documents unless they were more formal research papers, though who knows, I'm still a BaBy LaTeX user. I'd be interested to see how LaTeX works for slides, though it seems Keynote does such a great job for me that I'd be hard pressed to switch that up. What are some of the key benefits for making slides with LaTeX for you?
[...] Learning new things: LaTeX » How I use LaTeX var addthis_product = 'wpp-262'; var addthis_config = [...]
I wonder, Ben, is there any sort of front end out there that would allow you to design LaTeX documents using a WYSIWYG editor and then have it translate into the actual code, ala Dreamweaver?
@Roger: There is Lyx, which is a WYSIWYMean editor that might kind of do what you describe, though I have very little experience with it. I essentially know it exists and that's it. If you play around with it and find it super useful, be sure to let us all know. 🙂
Can get to MassMirror okay, but the d/l speeds are mnmiial. I'm experiencing massively reduced d/l speeds with all sites though.I'm not sure what you're talking about. You're not downloading the file from Mass Mirror, you're downloading it from one of the hosts, such as Rapidshare, Megaupload, Badango, etc.So if the actual file downloading is slow, it's one of those; not Mass Mirror. Or maybe your computer is not configured to download optimally.Jeff