Oct 12, 2009
LaTeX and Windows
LaTeX is a document markup language aimed to provide an highly efficient document production system. It’s often used as an intermediate language between publication format and hard code. Have you ever found yourself working on a more than 50 pages long Microsoft Word document? I did, and it hurts.. The scrolling is too fast, you can’t easily decompose your document, as soon as you move an image some page breaks appear, even though you carefully added manual page breaks to avoid this particular problem. LaTeX gives you the opportunity to write a book, a thesis or any publication with maths support and vector-based images support.
With LaTeX, you can create a title page, a table of contents and figures, in two lines. No need to try to separate headers and footers by chapters, managing styles in Word, try to add high-resolution images so that they can print correctly. In LaTeX, everything is done using markup. For instance, if you want to add a chapter, you just have to add \chapter{Title of the chapter} and begin writing text or adding a section using \section{Title of the section}. This language is amazing and easy to learn. If you’ve ever used HTML, you’ll soon understand how this languages works. There are plenty of guides on how to use LaTeX: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX
If you want to use LaTeX on Windows, I strongly recommend downloading this particular software: http://www.texniccenter.org/
