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Further to your point 4, WinEdt http://www.winedt.com/ is a really great editor tuned for (La)TeX documents that runs in windows. Indeed, it's the only thing I miss about windows.

WinEdt is lean and yet flexible enough. It helps you easily manage large documents split into different files and helps avoiding syntax errors to vastly improve your productivity with. You're able to edit, compile and debug your documents using the same WinEdt application.

I've used it for mulitple lengthy documents with above average complexity and it never failed me.

dude,

you are confusing the editors.

http://www.winedt.com/about.html, it's a latex shell.

I've just completed my thesis and have been quite happy with JabRef which a Java based frontend to Bibtex. It's really quite flexible and works well with LyX, Kile, or WinEdt. While I didn't need the capability, it can also import a whole bunch of formats.

I have been using LaTex since forever .. written my Physics thesis in it and still use it for writing letters and stuff. It is just simpler since I have all my templates set up and dont need to worry about layouting at all anymore.

I have found that it is essential to have a good IDE (powerful editor). The ones I can recommend are either Vim or Emacs with the respective addons if you are already familiar with either of those editor or otherwise make sure you check out Kile (http://kile.sourceforge.net/)if you run KDE (or anyhting else Linux that allows you to run KDE apps .. or even Cygwin) or under windows you have to check out WinEDT (http://www.winedt.com/ ).

And then of course the best resource for anything TeX is the CTAN network (CTAN: the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network http://www.ctan.org/). Lots of very useful stuff there.

Another poster has answered this below..

Is this true? (Hopefully using the right term...I mean itemized lists with roman numerials, numbers, letters for each part)

If you mean "itemized" or "enumerated" lists then yes there is a limit it appears you can go 5 deep.

The following will give a "Too deeply nested" error. Due to the "sub sub sub sub sub sub item"

N.B. It it not very pretty due to having to get past the "comment compression filter"...

\documentclass{article} \begin{document} \begin{itemize} \item Item \begin{itemize} \item Sub item \begin{itemize} \item Sub sub item \begin{itemize} \item sub sub sub item \begin{itemize} \item sub sub sub sub item \begin{itemize} \item sub sub sub sub sub item \end{itemize} \end{itemize} \end{itemize} \end{itemize} \end{itemize} \end{itemize} \end{document}

As with many aspects of LaTeX however if you find it doesn't do something it probably means it's not prudent (from a structural perspective) to do it anyway. For example if you really need that level of deep reference you may well be better off with part,chapter,section, subsection, ... . . .,itemize etc... Ironically I tried posting this reply with some deep nesting, slashdot posts are limited to three levels deep! ;-) Of course if you wish to you can always override the builtins with your own "super list" or something.

Also, can ya'll post some good links to a newbie learning LaTex..and some good reference sites that have all the tags layed out with good explanations?

Sure, below are a list places I would reccomend starting, you havn't said if you use Windows, *nix or Mac so i've added both (sorry if you are a Mac man you'll have to Google yourself).

• Editing:
• • *nix If you are a *nix user I would reccomend the following editing combination.
  • XEmacs
  • AucTeX. A sophisticated editing mode for LaTeX
  • preview-latex. Places the rendered equations and images directly in the editor window making "equation tuning" and other tasks a snip.
• Windows
• • WinEdt. A very sophisticated text editor for Windows. Its forte is LaTeX. It is not free, but well worth the money.

• Learning resources:
• • Getting started
  • Good overview
  • A list of symbols
  • The not so short introduction to LaTeX2e
  • Tips and tricks
  • BibTeX help.

• Other random stuff
• • dvipdfm. For converting the output of LaTeX into PDF (highly recommended)
  • Prof. Knuth's home page(The author of TeX).
  • CTANThe Comprehensive TeX Archive Network. Here you will be able to download packages, utilities and tools that do not come by default in your LaTeX distribution.

-ed

Amen.

I tried using both LyX and TeXmacs, but I couldn't stand the fact that they rely too much on menus and on the mouse, as you pointed out. Pretty much the best frontend to LaTeX that I've found is vim :)

The best gui frontend I've seen is winedt, available for windows. It's basically a text editor with a lot of nifty functionality that's useful for editing LaTeX code, like macros, a toolbar with commonly used symbols (which just pastes the latex code) and other neat stuff. Converting to pdf,ps,dvi is only a mouse click (or two) away, so I guess that's why I use it. Saves me from writing another makefile to do all the conversions :)

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