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What's LaTeX
LaTeX is a markup language, that you can use to create beautifully printed, professionally looking documents. You can produce documents in various formats, including pdf. LaTeX uses TeX as its "typesetting engine". TeX was created by the renowned computer science's Prof. Donald Knuth, who created it for typesetting its own books. LaTeX is freely available to anyone, you can download it from the internet. LaTeX creates very high quality documents, better than the commonly used work processors. Unlike word processors however, it's not a WYSIWYG system with which you can see the final output as you "type, point and click around", it's a markup language, basically you have to type commands that determine the layout of the document. Anyway you can easily see the output of your LaTeX documents as you write them just clicking a couple of buttons (with WinShell at least), that's not a big issue! The first big difference in terms of use, is that instead of "pointing and clicking" to, say, render a word in boldface, you have to write a short command for that. The second big difference is that LaTeX somewhat obliges you to thinking in terms of the structure of a document, and this should lead you to write better structured and logically structured documents. Another difference is that while with word processors if you make a mistake, like choosing the wrong layout for a table, you get something on the screen anyway, with LaTeX if you make a mistake with markup you get an error message, and this can be quite frustrating at first. There are many other differences, but I would like to point out just another one: LaTeX unlike, say, MS Word doesn't suddenly crashes without any reason...! If you don't want to go through the pains of learning a markup language however, a free WYSIWYG version of LaTeX also exists, it is called LyX.
Miscellaneous Advantages and Disadvantages
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The first advantage of LaTeX is its high quality output, that you generally can't get with common word processors. This is especially true if you have to typeset mathematics, LaTeX is in fact the software of choice for academics and the like who have to typeset long and complex math formulae
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The second advantage is that it makes you think in terms of the structure of a document, it has for example commands to define the sections, subsections, paragraphs of a document, you use them, and it takes care of the visual rendering selecting for example the appropriate font size or the indent in a systematic way (of course you also have commands to tweak every single detail of the layout if you need to change something). You have probably similar options with word processors, but many people don't use them. Anyway you have to learn how to use these options, why not to learn some markup with LaTeX which produces a better output then?
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A disadvantage is that you have to learn the markup language, it's not too difficult, but there is a rather steep learning curve. However to start off with a simple document is easy. Then as you go on you can learn how to do more complex things like formatting tables, inserting pictures, adding a bibliography, tweaking the layout of a document and so on. Now it is true that it may seem nonsense to have to learn and commands for things like setting the text in italics and the like (but consider also the times it takes each time you click and point to do it), however when it comes to more complex tasks like properly formatting a table as you want it, often word processors are no better, either you have already learnt how to do it, or you waste a lot of time trying to override stupid default options. So the user-friendliness depends very much on what you want to do.
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A main advantage is that LaTeX has full automation for many complex tasks, for example for the production of a table of contents, the management of a bibliography and citations, the production of an author index and the like, often you just type a command et voilą...you've got it, and also with the hyperref package you can have all your document cleverly hyperlinked. Of course again, to be fair, you can do some of these things with a word processor, but I bet this time it's easier to do them with LaTeX.
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You can easily produce pdf documents. Acrobat's pdf has become a standard in electronic publishing for many reasons, one of these it's that it is portable, that means everyone can download a pdf reader and then read pdf documents, no matter if they use Windows, Linux or the Mac OS. You shouldn't in fact publish or exchange documents in formats that are not portable, like MS Word, it's not polite towards other people who may not be able to open them. Furthermore pdf documents are much nicer than other formats and LaTeX allows you to customise them (you can have hyperlinks, coloured pages, default opening as you like!). It is true there are other tools to produce pdf documents from, say MS Word, many of them are expensive though, some are free of charge, but don't let you customise your pdf documents as LaTeX does.
- LaTeX is free software
- Many distribution of LaTeX are available free of charge, commercial distributions exist as well.
Getting Started!
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So you want to try it? Well, if you're running Linux or Unix it is likely that LaTeX is already installed in your system. A widespread distribution for Unix systems is teTeX
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For Windows users one popular distribution is MikTeX you can download it from the internet, you need also to download an editor, one that is available free of charge is WinShell, you can also download it from the internet. Install the two software, grab a copy of a good introductory manual from the internet, like The not so short introduction to LaTeX (again google it), open WinShell and you can get started. I'll put some notes also here about the usage of LaTeX.
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For Mac users versions of LaTeX are also available, but I don't know about them. You can find info on the internet.
- Enjoy!