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• R, including several add-on packages (such as tseries, RODBC, coda, mcmcpack, gtkdevice, rgtk, rquantlib, qtl, dbi, rmysql), out-of-the box support for the powerful ESS modes for XEmacs as well as the Ggobi visualisation program;
• A complete teTeX, TeX, and LaTeX setup for scientific publishing, along with TeXmacs and LyX for wysiwyg editing;
• Perl and Python with loads of add-ons, plus ruby, tcl, Lua, and Scientific and Numeric Python;
• The Emacs and Vim editors, as well as Gnumeric, kate, Koffice, jed, joe, nedit and zile;
• Octave, with add-on packages octave-forge, octave-sp, octave-epstk, and matwrap;
• Computer-algebra systems Maxima, Pari/GP, GAP, GiNaC and YaCaS;
• the QuantLib quantitative finance library including its Python interface;
• GSL, the Gnu Scientific Library (GSL) including example binaries;
• The GNU compiler suite comprising gcc, g77, g++ compilers;
• the OpenDX, Plotmtv, and Mayavi data visualisation systems;
• it includes apcalc,aribas,autoclass,

Generate a LaTeX document file, compile it using PDFLatex and print. Or, use normal LaTeX and print directly from it, depending if .dvi files offend you.

• Windows users: MiKTeX
• Mac Users: TeXShop
• General: Emacs w/ AucTeX
• There are many others, Google is your friend.

My laptop is a 166MHz with 96MB of RAM and a 1.6GB hard drive. Running Debian.

With a 266MHz system, you're going to need to be careful about the weight of the software you run.

First, skip any of the major Office varieties for Linux (OpenOffice, KOffice, AbiWord, etc.) ... they'll all run hideously slow. If you can, do you word processing as plain text. If you absolutely need formatting (and you're not handy with LaTeX and related apps like Lyx), use HTML. Raw code is good, but if that doesn't work for you, try Bluefish (requires X). Once you're on a desktop system, you can import it into OpenOffice or Word, where you can make any additional formatting changes you need.

If your laptop can take more RAM, install it. You'll need it. For my ThinkPad 760XL, installation of the SO-DIMMS wasn't too hard.

If you possibly can, do without X. That'll save you a world of time, especially when loading your OS off a USB flash disk. If you need X, go with a lightweight windowmanager, like twm. If that's a bit too extreme, try oroborus.

You're going to want as little memory footprint as possible. However, you're still probably going to need swap space, so I'd recommend against a flash device. Get one of the USB hard drives.

That's all I can really think of ATM.

if they're creating the documents, you surely mean word or more likely LaTeX. :)

Someone has to mention it sooner or later, and it might as well be me: LaTeX!

I've been using latex for a few months, including writing a research paper. Placement of figures can be a pain, but for text it is reasonably intuitive. All the formatting trivia is abstracted away, and you can concentrate on just writing. It's math features are nice, too, if you need them.

-jim

Don't use Word (or any other WYSIWYG word processor) for something that important.

Use something Open, Free, and great.

LaTeX

(That furry icon scares me too... :s )

Start at the LaTeX project site.

Go buy Leslie Lamport's "LaTeX: A Document Preparation System" book.

Take a look at the Indian TeX Users Group's LaTeX tutorial.

Then read Tobias Oetiker's "The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX 2e"

If you need a quick start then start using Lyx and their Tips and Tricks section.

Why would I want to run win32 programs? I can't think of one Windows program that doesn't have a better equivalent for Linux.

OpenOffice, LaTeX + emacs, eclipse, blender, gimp, mozilla, maple, mathematica, ut2004, etc. What do _you_ need Windows for?

Thank god I decided a few years later to give it another chance...

Your comment gives the mistaken impression that OSS is somehow destined to always be behind proprietary software, as far as innovation and technical superiority is concerned. Microsoft and SCO love that notion, but unfortunately for them, it's not true. OSS is overtaking proprietary software in many areas, and it's reasonable to expect this trend to continue.

Here are just some of many examples of innovative, open-source software:

Because all the big distributions allow you to install LaTeX..

Maybe the reason it has not materialized yet is that Latex2e works just fine.

It's probably LaTeX, which can be prepared from your favourite text editor, and rendered to print or PDF (or postscript) by entirely open-source software.

It's very nice.

The OO people are experimenting with support for XML export by associating styles with XML tags. The latest version has a beta implementation of "simplified DocBook". But again, this is pretty much what people already do with Word and Framemaker. The difference is that OO is less of a mess than Word, and the OO people will certainly do a better job of defining a mapping mechanism than the one that comes with "structured" Framemaker. That last thing is very badly designed!

When you're creating a structured document, you really want an authoring tool that writes directly to whatever XML application you're using. The problem with that is that you have to define this application before you can write a single word -- which makes this approach impractical for an ordinary productivity suite like Open Office.

The one tool I really like for this is XMetal. You can feed it a DTD and a set of stylesheets, and it's instantly ready to do WYSIWYG editing of XML. Unfortunately, XMetal now belongs to Corel, which seems determined to destroy it in the name of .NET support.

The leading XML/SGML editor is the Arbortext product (I foget what they changed the name to after the last rebranding). Unfortunately this one is expensive. Also, defining an XML or SGML application is non-trival.

I got all excited when I heard about Lyx, an open-source "Document Processor" that support structured documents. Unfortunately its native format is not structured. Once again, you have to define some kind of mapping between stylistic elements and your document structure.

Interesting thread here.

Check the motivation for LaTeX3 project. It seems they are addressing page-layout issues even more agressively than in current LaTeX.

Somebody needs to introduce you to LaTeX.

Like I said in my original post: I need page layout, not document design. I need to move the graphic on page 148 1/16" to the left to accommodate a footnote. I want to put a box around this art, but break the border to let the wizard's hand overlap the boundary and intrude amusingly into the text. I have to design the game's character sheet. For all this I need to see the stuff on the page and drag it around with the mouse.

192 pages!? Somebody needs to introduce you to LaTeX.

Right tool for the right job, yadda yadda.

I think it's always been Free Software, as has TeX. If you want details, go to the source. I believe Leslie Lamport just started writing some macros for structured documents in Donald Knuth's TeX text layout language.

I find it ironic that the original author of one of the most successful Free Software projects now works for a company that has publicly declared itself an enemy of copyleft.

Hear ye hear ye. A bunch of my fellow students and I have been using Prosper, a slide making package for LaTeX. Only it doesn't look like the regular slide package that comes with LaTeX. Very slick, not at all boring or bland. And of course with all the equation power of LaTeX. And they're not hard to make either.

The output is PDF files, which for presentations can be displayed easily in fullscreen on anything that will display PDF files. We have recieved many comments on how slick the presentations look, especially the equations which are unequalled by any MS package.

See the screenshots. The Contemporain and White Cross styles are very beautiful.

Have fun!

Cheers,

Costyn.

What really bothers me is that people who aren't ready for Linux have not got the choice of a halfway ethical solution to their problem. It's basically either use-Microsoft-or-use-nothing.

Perhaps you are overlooking MacOS? Yeah yeah Apple is partly 0wned by MS, and I'm actually not an Apple fan myself, but the Macintosh platform makes a lot of sense for many people.

By the way, if there's a single decent word processor in existence, it's escaped my radar. The last pretty-good one I used was Microsoft Word 6.

I don't think they exist. The word processing paradigm is fundamentally flawed -- I don't care about words, I care about entire documents. For this reason I don't use word processors.

I use software like LaTeX or (rarely) LyX to create documents. However, if you're used to word processors, you'll probably have a terrible time with these too, at least at first.

There are certainly times when one would want a non-CLI interface even if one were blind - for example, when using programs that are not (and should not) be for the console, such as word processors.

You mean the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) word processors? (I hope it's not some stupid joke.) "The best output a blind person using WYSIWYG software can hope for is getting no output at all" as the anonymous geek quoted on BLinux FAQ has said. There are typesetting (or "word processing") tools working perfectly well in any text editor you have. I personally use Donald Knuth's TeX and Leslie Lamport's LaTeX extention because they are more powerful than any WYSIWYG tool I've ever used (including TeXmacs), while also giving me much better looking results. They're not only more powerful for people with good sight like myself, they can also be used from any text editor a blind person can use, like the Emacspeak for example. That's if a blind person ever needs such a tool, like for writing a book or printed article. Because using word processors for communication (like most of people use Microsoft Word these days) instead of plain text email is stupid at least.

Recently Gnome suddenly started refusing to start up. Have you tried Enlightenment? You can install it (like anything else) in your home directory, without root access, by conifurging it with something like --prefix=/home/dozer/enlightenment and adding the executable to your .xinitrc or .xsession file. Luckily with Linux you have an alternative to using mem-heavy UI's like KDE and GNOME, while still getting the benefits from having their libraries installed. (You can still run programs that require Gnome, without running the Gnome environment). As a side note, you probably could have used Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to kill the X server and edit those files on the console rather than using a M$ machine to do it ;) No decent text editor. gedit stinks. Download NEdit. You get syntax highlighting, line numbers, and a whole bunch of other nifty stuff without feeling "bloated" while using it. It even comes precompiled for most platforms ;) Motif apps. Mathematica and Matlab are big, slow ... The rest of the world agrees. Write a letter to Wolfram. =P No word processor. ...Can't copy and paste pictures. Sounds like it's time to take an hour and learn LaTeX. Afterwords, you'll never want to use a word processor or paste pictures again. Additionally, your term papers and reports will be written faster and look more professional. An added benefit comes when you consider that most science journals would require you to submit a paper in LaTeX, so it's better to learn *now* than *later* after you've written your 100+ page thesis in M$ Word and have to transfer all of it.

Some variation of the methods described in "Literate Programming" by Donald Knuth are a good place to start. In summary, Knuth says that you should be able to extract from the same source both machine instructions, and a human parsable document, with unusually high importance placed on the later. Whether or not you want to imbed LaTeX into your document is up to you (I never have bothered), but on the whole find something that will make your code and algorithms understandable to another programmer who's never met you (because that's probably who will be either grading or maintaining your code at some point).

... is the only truly well-commented code. Literate programming was invented by Knuth. If you don't know who Knuth is: he's the author of the definitive CS work called "The Art of Computer Programming". Ask any of your friends who actually studied computer science about it.

Knuth wrote more than books. For example, he wrote the typesetting program, TeX which is to this very day the most popular way academics in the CS field employ to write their papers (especially using a macro package called LaTex). He just wasn't satisfied with the available ways to write mathematical books at the time (early 80s). He had a good reason - you can see the difference in quality between it and anything else - especially Word (Ugh).

To ensure you'll have the right idea about the quality of his work, note he's actually sending people checks when they find a bug in his books or his code. Of course people tend to frame them rather than cache them :-). Also note that nobody has managed to obtain such a check for a long time.

So, what is literate programming anyway? Instead of inventing yet another definition, here's a pretty good definition which you can find in the site, together with many others:

Marc van Leeuwen. "Requirements for Literate Programming" in CWEBx Manual, pg. 3-4.

The basic idea of literate programming is to take a fundamentally different starting point for the presentation of programs to human readers, without any direct effect on the program as seen by the computer. Rather than to present the program in the form in which it will be compiled (or executed), and to intercalate comments to help humans understand what is going on (and which the compiler will kindly ignore), the presentation focuses on explaining to humans the design and construction of the program, while pieces of actual program code are inserted to make the description precise and to tell the computer what it should do. The program description should describe parts of the algorithm as they occur in the design process, rather than in the completed program text. For reasons of maintainability it is essential however that the program description defines the actual program text; if this were defined in a separate source document, then inconsistencies would be almost impossible to prevent. If programs are written in a way that concentrates on explaining their design to human readers, then they can be considered as works of (technical) literature; it is for this reason that Knuth has named this style of software construction and description "literate programming".

Does it work in practice? All I can say is that I have used it in a real-world project with great success. The main downsides to it, and this applies to any type of documentation, is that it takes up-front time (even if it does save time later), and that you need to employ people with some measure of writing ability. It is surprising how many people can code well, but are hard-pressed to write coherent, readable description of their code. Especially if you write your documentation in English and the programmer's native language is Hebrew or Russian :-(

Oh, and it also is hard to do in IDEs like Visual Studio. And you won't learn about it in your university, never mind your VB in 3 days course. Just like design by contract and many other techniques, the problem isn't that humanity doesn't know how to write software well - it is that humanity doesn't want to.

most colleges give the students special deals. at pitt we get ms office, windows (2000, xp), visual studio, etc. for free.

< side though >
no body worth their weight in ram uses word or open office for a 400 page document. LaTeX is so much better.
</side though >

• VTKis a very good package for scientific visualization.
• Maxima is a Free computer algebra system, a bit like Mathematica. It can solve equations, do calculus, plot things, produce TeX output of what you've done, and lots more. Incredibly useful for long tedious bits of algebra.
• gnuplot is a versatile graphing package (2D and 3D, but maxima or VTK are IMO better for 3d stuff). As well as graphing, it can try to fit arbitrary functions to your experimental data.
• LaTeX -- it's very hard indeed to typeset equations better than LaTeX can.

have you tried LaTeX? the output is quite beautiful, and it has alot of functionality that makes the writing of books very easy. if you have any questions let me know if i can help.

I see this as yet another example of the mistaken idea that HTML-like tags make a language more user-friendly. Glossing over the difference between server-side code and client-side markup will only lead to confusion in the long run.

People need to understand that server-side templating systems (in the sense that includes PHP, JSP, BRL; not the limited WebMacro/Velocity definition of template), work by a sort of editorial process. I choose a syntax that acknowledges that editorial process.

Take the first example from the BOA tutorial. What's server-side instructions and what's client side markup? If you're not familiar with HTML it might be hard to tell the difference.

<setvar name=a value=1>
<strong>this is a strong <insert name=a></strong>

In contrast, the following code makes it clear what is literal HTML (what the browser will get), and what is an editorial instruction.

[(define a 1)]
<strong>this is a strong [a]</strong>

Other advantages of square-bracket syntax:

• The performance penalty of doing a table lookup for every HTML tag is eliminated.
• If you misspell setvar, BOA sends the tag literally; a beginner will need some time to figure out what happened. If you misspell define, BRL will send an error message; it's obvious what happened.
• More conciseness; less typing.
• The syntax makes sense even in non-SGML markup, e.g. LaTeX.

1. Why and how is a computer program expressive speech? What does it express?

A computer program, represented by source code, is free speech because I lerned about as much about all that computer stuff from reading source code as I learned from lectures and books. A piece of source code expresses the authors understanding (or misunderstanding) of a problem domain and ideas how to solve the problem. The PHP Base Library (PHPLib) for instance is a comprehensive guide to session management and user authentication for web applications. Sure, there's also a manual, but a lot of detail is buried in the actual source code and nowhere else. And reading the source code gives me confidence the authors know what they do. Source code examples posted to Usenet, on the other hand, often show common errors or misunderstandings, and thus trigger discussions on style, security, robustness, etc.

A compiled, binary program can be expressive speech as well. For instance I am interested in typesetting -- since I used LaTeX for the first time, and though I never looked at the source code. I understand formal languages much better after playing with Lex and Yacc and AWK, which represent generic concepts for interpretation of certain classes of formal languages. Even without myself looking at the source code, those programs told me something, something their authors had written down carefully in a programming language. If that's not expression, there's no expression at all in any language.

The question should read: Why may computer-illiterate people consider computer programs being different from expressive speech, and how could they be educated?

Oh, and a final reminder: Freedom of speech has been invented to protect you from powerful entities who don't like whot you say.

• LaTeX is bad at handling images[...]

Sorry, but I take exception at that. It would be great if Word would handle images at least as good as LaTeX. I.e., if it would

• not crash all the time if one uses more than 10 or 20 images in one document.
• be able to rotate included images in arbitrary angles (or, at least to landscape!)
• position them correctly as floating figures even when one changes the text a lot
• provide proper and working cross references and tables of figures, even if one changes text and figure captions a lot

And that's just the first few points that irritate me the most. I could go on and on for hours how bad Word is. It's not a word processor, but nothing more than a typewriter with a glorified interface and a brain dead dancing paperclip, pushed by The Marketing Machine[tm] as a de-facto standard.

Concerning Framemaker, that's a different thing: It's a neat system. Too bad that Adobe pulled the plug for the Linux version.

Disclaimer: Once, I was involved in LaTeX development. I'm still the admin contact for the LaTeX Project's domain. Nowadays, as a consultant, I'm writing Word and Powerpoint documents for a living. I've got my share of experience with all those systems, maybe even more that I want.

I have used LaTeX for years for technical documentation and have never had a single bit rot on me ;-) It is much more useful for organizing your thoughts in a coherent framework than HTML and even MS or other word-processing standards, and, of course, it is easily translated to HTML, PostScript, PDF, etc. The suits think that the tech types who use it are crazy because they can't edit our documents, but it truly makes my documentation efforts more efficient. LaTeX receives my full endorsement.

LaTeX is an excellent tool, but it's a tool to organize information into platform-independent documents. These documents are set up using pre-defined types (this is an article, a book, etc.), and then organized following the established structure for that document type. LaTeX then provides a variety of tools to simplify cross-referencing, indexing, and otherwise making logincal use of that information.

Using LaTeX to provide greater control over the layout of information on the Web seems like it would be falling into the same trap that ate HTML -- if you remember, HTML was originally intended to organize information in a logical hierarchy, not make pretty pictures.

The paragraph of links:
At least one other person has already pointed to TeX 2 HTML and LaTeX 2 HTML, so I'll just add that if you're interested in well structured documents on the Web, it is actually true that XML has a lot to offer. And as long as I'm listing sites off like a madman, let's not forget the good old W3C.

Oh, yeah...http://www.latex-project.org...


Coke Is It (1982)

College students need to write reports, create lab reports (embedding charts, diagrams, etc) and other larger projects.

In science and mathemetics, at least, this is usually accomplished with LaTeX. Diagrams are done with any tool that can generate EPS, like xfig or Graphviz. MS Word's equation editor sucks quite badly.

And there's a big difference between "you can embed diagrams" and "you can catch a virus". Yes, an exploit here or there is understandable. MS has made it quite clear that they're either clueless or careless when it comes to security, considering the sheer number and severity of exploits in their products. And their excuse that "there is no evidence that such activities are occurring" is even more unsettling. It reveals a whole attitude towards security akin to "the bank vault is secure until someone steals all the money".

You said "But when I want to write texts, I just want to write a text. I don't want to be forced to write a program in order to get it done."

Well, yes. Plain TeX is/was like that. That's one of the reasons why LaTeX appeared. I really don't feel like I'm "programming" when I write a document using LaTeX. Well... maybe when I write the header stuff (the \usepackage[foo]{bar} and \author{baz} stuff), but certainly not when I write the main body of the document.

LaTeX "encourages authors not to worry too much about the appearance of their documents, but to concentrate on getting the right content." (that last bit was taken from http://www.latex-project.org/intro.html).