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"If Word 2010 does this extremely well, perhaps they deserve to become the editor of choice. How well does OpenOffice.org do this?"

I wouldn't use either for book size projects, that's what TeX is for.

Even Microsoft is embracing it now.

These guys at MS, may be fired soon: not only they have used Linux for the device: they have used LaTeX to write the paper!:
producer: MiKTeX GPL Ghostscript 8.60
creator: dvips(k) 5.96dev Copyright 2007 Radical Eye Software
At least (for them) MiKTeX is a windows LaTeX install

MiKTeX (pronounced mick-tech) is an up-to-date implementation of TeX and related programs for Windows (all current variants).

You want mpm, the MikTeX package manager for unix.

Have you ever tried MiKTeX? http://www.miktex.org/ The installation is a bit awkward compared to Windows' standards, but if you can actually read (which you should be able to in order to learn LaTeX), it does not pose any problem whatsoever.

I use linux because the software I use: emacs, LaTeX, gcc, is unavailable on Windows, at least without hacking or using some emulator that never quite works right

• "GNU Emacs for Win32."
• "MiKTeX is an up-to-date TeX implementation for the Windows operating system."
• "MinGW: A collection of freely available and freely distributable Windows specific header files and import libraries combined with GNU toolsets that allow one to produce native Windows programs that do not rely on any 3rd-party C runtime DLLs."

also, wow, file management is a pain in the arse using a mouse

how do people manage without grep, sed and awk?

Anything else you wanted?

There is a WP2LaTeX tool http://www.penguin.cz/~fojtik/wp2latex/wp2latex.htm available for both Windows and Linux which does a pretty decent conversion. BTW inserting accented characters in TeX & friends is rather straightforwards: \`e, \'e, \"e etc so you can usually get by with just a couple of extras keystrokes on a standard US keyboard.

I found it very easy to install. (download page). I then installed Winshell, and never looked back.

There is TeX for Windows. It's called MikTeX.

It takes forever to fully install but works decently fine.

Tom

Really? MiKTeX has everything one could want and installs without a problem.

I'd say it is quite nice for writing almost any type of document. Only when I really need WYSIWYG I use something else. But then I need a real DTP program which Word isn't

LaTex FTW!

Tools you need if you are running WinXp:
http://www.miktex.org/
http://www.toolscenter.org/
And googel for "the not so short guide to latex" and you off!

Use CVS to share the documents.

LaTeX typesetting beautiful documents

Yeah, better install Linux, because god knows MikTeX, emacs, and vim aren't available for Windows...

But I do agree with you. Once you learn LaTeX you will spit on anything like equation editor for the rest of your life. These days I can write math in tex almost as fast as I can by hand.

I, for one, (do not welcome our new LaTeX overlords)-- rather, I use MiKTeX and TexnicCenter to do LaTeX in Windows. Output to PS, PDF, or DVI (any probably others). Never had a problem with it at all.

Maybe Linux has some nice tex2dvi and dvi2pdf commands, but that's hardly a selling point to me.

The ability to typeset sublime mathematics and papers based not on WYSIWYG, but form and content; both of which may be possible under MiKTeX, but it seemed most natural to migrate, if not to whose nativity, then to the least hostile environment for work.

I find MiKTeX works wonderfully for me on Windows. Between that and Windows ports of GNUPlot, Ghostscript, and XEmacs, I can be quite productive.

Go LaTeX!

For Windows:
http://www.miktex.org/
http://www.toolscenter.org/

Speaking of backwards compatibility, I have a story that tops yours. Back in 1988 or 1989, my dad would type his research-papers with a proprietary system called Mass-11 that ran under plain DOS (his PC was an 8088 clone), export them to ASCII files, and run them through TeX. Just a month or so ago, we tested the programs on his Windows ME box, and it seemed to do everything he might want; however, we didn't try printing to the printer he used to use, because he also has MikTeX (which can print to his DeskJet or PDF) installed on that system. I've also run the program on an NT 4.0 box, so I doubt it would have any problems on XP Pro. That's a 15-year program useful lifetime. Of course, my dad would probably be better off just making sure he's exported everything he might possible want to copy and then junk the program.

If a program stuck to the standard C library or the documented DOS API, it probably kept working from then 'till now; same thing for Windows program that stuck to the core API. However, in the DOS/Windows/Visual Basic/.NET programming milieu there's long been an attitude that one needs to use obscure or undocumented APIs to produce good programs. Sure, some of this came from sources outside of Microsoft, but even today articles on MSDN tend to encourage writing to the latest-and-greatest version of Windows using non-backwards-compatible toolkits or still-developing platforms. (This one, for instance, talks about "Avoiding the Win32 API"!). Now, oficially .NET is an ECMA standard, just like JavaScript, but even MSDN encourages Windows-centric ways of doing things (which is bad because of this question about Registry support, for instance). I guess the documentation for gets() has an OK warning to use fgets() instead, but I think the "BUGS" section of the corresponding UNIX manpage is better.

I'm in the same boat, although I do think that it takes an above-average level of computer competency to run Windows XP without spyware problems. Then again, I've always had hardware problems under Linux, so it seems like you need to excel at computers regardless of the OS you're using if you want it to be stable. Or maybe run Mac OS X (I don't know, I haven't tried it).

But yeah, I play games, do .NET coding, surf the Internet, and do school stuff all on Windows. What's nice is that a lot of what seems like Unix-exclusive software also runs on Windows. There's ActivePython, MiKTeX, a large collection of command-line Unix utilities, including wget, and even games such as FreeCiv. Other people might have different needs that necessitate Linux, but Windows runs fine for me.

With that said, Txiasaeia, you might want to try Gentoo for something different in the Linux world. Installation takes a while since it's a very manual process, but the entire distribution makes me feel "cleaner" when I use it (yes, I still take showers). Mandrake feels like absolute bloat to me, but I fell in love with Gentoo once I tried it.

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

Does anyone know if it would be legal to make a CD full of Windows patches and service packs? Such a CD would be incredibly useful for me, and perhaps other people. Someone could write a nice pamphlet on how to protect your computer, and provide a simple installation program for installing necessary patches from the CD.

It'd be like one of those health pamphlets, such as "how to protect yourself against skin cancer", but geared towards protecting Windows computers.

Replacements for commonly-exploited parts of Windows could also be included, such as Firefox, and as a bonus, MiKTex and a tutorial can be included to free college students from the grasps of Microsoft Equation Editor ;)

> So to me it does not look like "some porn sites plastered
> the term "XFree86" all over themselves", but more like a
> suspiciously blocked search query.


A "friend" (cough) told me that there is a porn site with xfree in it's URL.

BTW, a search for "latex" comes up with Mac TeX second down but with the Windows port MiKTeX nowhere to be seen. I wonder why....

That was great for the days when spell checking was a process that took a long time. But now it can be done almost instantly for any reasonable length document (I have a 35kword document I'm working on with OO.org with a few non-dictionary words in it, and a spell check occurs as quickly as I can move my eyes from clicking the 'skip' button back to the box that displays the word that isn't in the dictionary). The idea of checking the spelling 'while you're away' is an idea that had its time ten years ago, it just isn't possible now. The check will be done before you can get out of your seat.

And you suffer because you let typesetting interfere with the creative process. Have a look here to see how you can create a good document. I used Word for a while and hated all the little things it did while you were typing the document--like reformatting the paragraph continuously, and changing spelling when it thought you had made a mistake.

Consumers will save money because competition will drive the price of the technology down

The danger (as always with things Micro$oft) is that they will embrace, extend, and then exterminate. Witness the web, which is now 99% geared towards IE (which has YET to implement W3C standards).

• LyX for Linux/Unix, or Windows with cygwin
• TeXnic Center for Windows only (GPL), works with MikTeX
• Scientific Workplace for Windows only (commercial)
• Textures for Macintosh, another commercial product

We will outsmart OpenSource....

Read as:

We will outsmart, PHP, Perl, MySQL, OpenMosix, Apache, Audacity, Crystal Space, MiKTeX, SDL, Vega Strike, X-Tractor, FileZilla, ... (yes most of this also runs, if not exclusively, on windoze).

Or:

We will outsmart freedom and choice.

Somehow, I don't see it. Then again, a lot of money can buy a lot of laws....

I won't comment on the Word v. Wordperfect since I use Latex everywhere, but you can use Latex with Windows natively. I've not used Lyx since vi takes care of my needs in Linux, but on Windows I use TeXnicCenter and the common backend of MikTex.

Well, after some research, I settled on using LaTeX. Actually, I used the MiKTeX distribution on MS Win NT4.0. For the screenshots and Visio diagram manipulation, I wrote some Perl scripts and used ImageMagick and a copy of GhostScript 7.0 for producing PostScript and then PDF files for printing and distribution purposes. The comp.text.tex was a valuable resource as well.

I spent one weekend at home learning the basics of LaTeX, used the "Article" class to help produce a good document layout. Over the next 4 months I learned to write my own macros, create table of contents, indices, glossary, etc, and came up with a 500+ page technical design manual.

Not once did the system crash on me, and I could spend most of my time on the content. Yes, I did spend time on converting Windows .bmp bitmap files into JPG format for inclusion into the document, but with the help of some home-made Perl scripts, I pretty much automated the process of conversion, cropping and resizing. In the end, I preferred this method to dragging and resizing bitmaps within MSWord.

Customized Perl scripts were written to dynamically create LaTeX tables which showed software versions used in our product, references to other documents, etc. The entire document was dynamically "built" into a PDF file.

It took a little time to install, figure out and customize.

The end result was a very clean, compressed PDF document, which we could distribute to all interested parties via email.

I really learned a lot, and it saved me a lot of time formatting the document; I had content, and I had software that did the formatting for me.

Everyone was impressed, but LaTeX was not the "standard" within the company. "We must use MS Word", I was told. This came straight from upper management. Much of the document generation was automated, and there was obvious benefits (free open-source software, no crashing, PDF output without the use of Acrobat, dynamic image manipulation and data inclusion, etc). Even so, MS Word was to be used in subsequent documents.

The point is, even though you might think MS Word is crap and you want to look for alternatives, bear in mind the standards used within the company. Standards become even more important within "global" companies; too many non-standardized products can be costly.

Also, let's say you write a document in LaTeX or DOCBOOK, you quit or get hit by the bus one day (heaven forbid). How are your co-workers going to maintain your document? Can the secretary easily make formatting changes? How about your boss?

Over the past few months I began to use Word for much smaller documentation. It's a pain to use, but I did learn how to use it to make decent looking documents. It just takes more time to produce a document in Word than it does in LaTeX.

Hope this helps in giving you some ideas.

After many months of searching, I have yet to find a way to properly convert a PDF file (generated from LaTeX) to MS Word, retaining all formatting with the hyperlinks and references in MS Word format. Does anyone know?

The combination of Miktex (LaTex for windows) and Winedt is pretty awesome. Unfortunately Winedt isn't available for Linux. pstricks is also pretty handy.

I think it is great that there will be a cygwin-w32 architecture available through the Debian packaging system. However, what I would really like to see are native ports of GNU & other freeware packages. I've used Emacs, Vim, and MiKTeX on windows, as well as many file-utils and devel-utils have been ported, partially listed here or here (compiled primarily the MinGW or DJGPP compilers), but they are not centrally available or managed. I would also argue that the Debian branch for cygwin programs should be called w32-cygwin, and the native programs be under w32.

Just some more thoughts to fuel the fire.

1. OpenNap
2. XFree86
3. Cygwin
4. Emacs
5. Vi and Vim
6. Mojo Nation
7. Visual Tcl
8. MikTEX
9. Open Perl IDE
10. Mozilla
11. WinCVS
12. BitchX
13. Firebird
14. mySQL