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Where Can I find Sources for Learning LaTex?
the_2nd_coming asks: "I am currently in college and I am majoring in math and computer science. Writing papers in Word and OpenOffice, while not a pain, is slow work due to formating. I have learned that LaTex is used for writing Math and Science papers a lot and once learned makes writing papers quick. I have found few good comprehensive resources on the web, and few books in the book stores. I was amazed that O'Reilly did not even have a book on it. What good sources are there that can teach me LaTex for Mathematics and BibTex?"
The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.
Unless you feel you need the full, raw power of LaTeX, I would recommend using Lyx. It is a 'what-you-see-is-what-you-mean' graphic editor for LaTeX. I used it all through college for writing electrical engineering lab reports, and it was many time easier to use than Word. The result was so beautiful it even blew away my professors. And that was a few years ago, so it is probably even better now.
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"For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain." - Phil. 1:21 (KJV)
I was amazed that O'Reilly did not even have a book on it.
That's because the definitive text, by LaTeX author Leslie Lamport, was published in 1986 by Addison-Wesley two years before O'Reilly got into the publishing business. Nobody's seen a need to improve on it I guess. Interestingly enough, Leslie Lamport works at Microsoft now, so I would assume if he published any new books on LaTeX they'd be Microsoft Press.
Once you get into more advanced usages, The LaTeX Companion is a good second book to pick up.
I don't know if you would want to use a GUI but LyX is a great editor that exports to LaTeX, and supports alot of features. In this way you can quickly see lots of the functions that are available to you, and then export to LaTeX to see how to do them.
I find it particularlly useful for the math formulas.
The Latex and Tex sites have tons of Documentation, even to the specific codes for the symbols...and Donald Knuth, the guy who invented Tex, has written a few books, check out his site, and ask any one of your professors how they learned it, they probably have to use it all of the time.
Travis
The way I learned the most about LaTeX was by looking at the sources of all of the documents that came with it. Look at the AMS documents, for example. You can find all kinds of LaTeX source documents on the web as well.
Then start creating your own documents, and trying out things. Search on google or groups.google if you are getting errors---someone else has run into them before you.
Good luck!
Karma: Marginal (mostly due to the border around the website)
You can search: latex math
And you get this: LaTeX: Math into LaTeX Short Course
Well, just search on google. =)
http://lark.cc.ukans.edu/~pauljohn/software/latex4 wp.pdf
It's a great intro document that allows you to translate all of the habits you've picked up from Word/OOWriter in LaTeX commands. I don't write reports without it.
Those who don't know me, probably shouldn't trust me. Those that do know me, DEFINITELY shouldn't trust me.
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.
If you think it's slow using a word-processor, Latex will make you feel like you have a clone who's only job is to figure stuff out while the rest of the world continues getting work done, oh, and you're the clone who doesn't get anything done while you figure Latex out.
No, really...Latex has many advantages. If you are happy to let it pick all your formatting settings, then speed is one of them. Otherwise, if you need things formatted a certain way, it's a HUGE time-sink. I personally like more control, so I find myself spending the vast majority of my time finding out how to format things MY way and often I forget loads of cryptic codes, so I find myself having to look up stuff again and again.
Use styles in a word processor...then as you write, just select which style you want to be using currently. It's faster, safer and much much cheaper.
Other people have mentioned Lamport's book; I thought I'd put in a word for "A Guide to LaTeX" by Helmut Kopka and Patrick W. Daly, Addison-Wesley, 1999 (looks like there's also a 2003 edition). I think this book succeeds in the very difficult task of being both a reference and a read-through text. I've successfully used it to write a thesis, a few publications and quite a few homeworks.
Here
you can find a very good short guide to LaTeX. It is not comprehensive, but it can get you started fast, and contains all the basic to intermediate material you need to typeset technical documents. It is used widely at my university.
It is really simple to use in documents/spreadsheets/etc., it has a speedbump sized learning curve, it's WYSIWYG, and you've already got it.
Thinking of starting a business in Minnesota? Me too! mnsmall.biz
I started with Lyx, which is quite good in itself. It can export to LaTeX. If you're completely new, you can start with writing a small document in Lyx, export it, and continue from there. Then you should see how the basic stuff works. Or you can use LaTeX commands in Lyx. After I went over to using LaTeX, Lyx has still been able to import my documents.
There are lots of free documentation as well. The not so short introduction to LaTeX2E is a very good introduction. If you use some kind of *nix, you should install the documentation that comes with your LaTeX distribution. At least TeTeX comes with a nice browsable help system: texdoctk. You probably have more documentation than you thought you had.
BibTeX is complicated. You should learn about it before you are halfway through your thesis, because there are lots of options and styles, and the styles take different options. BibTeX Tutorial is a bit helpful, but it doesn't tell you everything you want to know. There are many different citation styles -- natbib and jurabib are the only ones I've looked at. The former lets you choose between author-year and numerical citation styles, whereas the latter is based on footnotes. You probably want natbib in mathematics (but I'm not sure!).
LaTeX is actually quite easy to use, but you'll need an editor you can use with it, and one that you're comfortable with. Most people prefer Emacs, for some silly reason. It might have something to do with the fact that you can run the whole environment from within the editor. But don't be fooled! Vim is still the best editor out there! *ducks*
(More seriously: you can use any editor that will let you write plain ASCII text. If you prefer vim to Emacs, you can use that. But Emacs has loads of good LaTeX modes. I think AucTex is preferred among those who use it.)
This was a dumb place to ask, as most slashdotters do not need latex.
You can always use it for the mundane stuff and do the fancy stuff by hand later.
Plus, it's not so ugly it makes you want to claw your own eyes out, unlike LyX.
Check out Hypertext Help with LaTeX if you need a quick, online reference. Not so great if you actually need to learn LaTeX from scratch, however.
Note to self: get smarter troll to guard door.
Though the power of a good reference book and a few tutorials is not to be underestimated, LaTeX is readable enough that you'll learn a lot just by downloading other people's source, and modifying it for your own use. Once you've got the basic syntax, it should be simple for you to build on different documents and styles.
Ok, there is currently a great deal of information over the net for TeX, LaTeX, and derivatives. Knuth is the authoritative guide, useful for the mechanics of typesetting and the internals of the whole system. LaTeX is an augmented set of macros useful in preparing articles, books, reports, even letters.
And since O'Reilly is THE source of educational material in computing, they DO have a book about TeX but it is out of print. It explains how TeX distributions such as TeXLive, the official distribution by TeX User's Group work, and how to put the constituent parts such as BiBTeX (the bibliographic management software).
So much for history. As far as the resources part is concerned, Google is your eternal friend.
.sig
I've just gone through the same process of learning LaTeX. However, I'm an OS X user and I found Mac-Tex at Penn State to be a very good resource. I chose TexShop for my front end iInstaller to install the LaTeX backend. You can also use Fink to install your backend but I didn't feel like comand line install this time as suggested previously.
Other than getting the software installed, I simply used Google for tutorials on LaTeX and BibTex.
I took 150 pages of Word documentation, exported it as text. In less then 2 days (most of which was spent proofing the document, and pulling out the graphics, diagrams and screenshots), I had the document fully sourced in Latex. I setup macros for various things. The headers, footers I wrote custom cut macros to size for it. I wrote three or four different types of list customizations (instructions, feature lists, outlines, and possible something else).
I write about a dozen different macros most of which ended up being bold or italics for each different type of item. Then I read the document, as I came across things, I used the macro to define what they were. \button{OK}, \windowTitle{Main Screen}, stuff like that.
I customized a wrap-around package for the graphics.
Then when I wanted something to change, I changed the macro, and everything was fixed. No searching the document to find them all. I just setup a .cls file (a Class/Style file), and that was it. Then I just typed. Everything looked exact. Everything looked consistant. Everything was a single render away from finishing. Version of the doucment could be "diff'ed" using standard text tools. I could integrate the changes from a half dozen people with relative ease.
If you are fiddling around with things a bunch, you should have just written a document style, and let Latex handle all of the spacing for you. If you are fiddling with the layout of your document all the time, you are doing it wrong. Stop applying asethetics to it. It's just a document, not a work of art. Drag the style file that has every technique you've ever used around with you. Comment them in and out as you need them.
Consistancy looks better then perfection to me at least. I suppose I could see fiddling with the inter-spacing of mathematical formulas, and possible a bit of tinkering with table column sizes. However, most of that is quick and easy relative to doing it in Word/WordPerfect/Office. In my experince resizing anything in an Office document that is 300 pages long is a good way to crash office, run your machine out of memory, and really be frustrated.
The beauty of Latex is that you setup a style guide, and then just type your document. It's over. Maybe you include a handful of images. Layout a style for each different type of object you want to use, and then just use the macros for those objects. That's all you ever have to do. Fiddling with sizing, spacing, and control is over. Along with the fact, that Latex has far better control in my experience then any other Word Processing system I've ever used.
Kirby
i used _LaTeX for Linux_ by Bernice Sacks Lipkin (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/038 7987088/qid=1083015560/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xg l14/103-9939465-0827818?v=glance&s=books&n=507846) and it's a good cookbook-y kind of approach to things. i'm now fluent enough in LaTeX that when i do need to look something up, google does a good job of finding what i'm looking for.
/and/ properly crossreference captions. since then i'm the only kid who ever turns in anything that's LaTeX'd in any of my classes.
btw, i started using LaTeX because )(*@#&* word wouldn't put pictures where i told it to
Well put. There are some gotchas which can make your layout funky (empty newlines in a big math contex eg) but those are few and far between. If you are trying to make LaTeX look like something it's not then most likely you are trying to make it look "wrong". That's my experience at any rate.
And since it's a text document you can do a load of magic with it, just as you mention. Take a large document and break it into pieces and you can work on it concurrently. (Try that in any Word version or clone.) You can even put in in a version control system.
If you are doing things like API descriptions you can let scripts extract information from your source code and have an instantly updated API document each time you compile the project.
Really, LaTeX is a real killer when you are just "getting the work done". If you are doing layout for a paper it may not help you much. That's note really what it's for though.
Crap, I forgot the one biggest benefit I have encountered with LaTeX compared to eg Word. It doesn't completely fuck up references. Whenever I use references in a Word document I know that sooner or later it's going to get corrupt and I'll have to add them all again. It just seems like it can't properly handle that you move figures around and such.
The best way to learn LaTeX is to take and modify someone else's source code.
For that reason, I have the source code for my thesis and an IEEE technical publication on my website here. It should work with a vanilla LaTeX installation in both Linux and MacOS (just type "make preview"). In Windows you'll need to install MikTeX and TeXnicCenter.
Michael.
Linux : Mac
Doing layout is rather easy with latex... In general if you re-use your design, f.e. develop something template based, like a montly magazine) latex is a perfect way to go (that is if you are a nerd implementing a designer's layout, latex seems too difficult for brain-dead designers). And it is very easilt coupled with dynamic data sources (multi-channeling etc.).
But if you want to layout something only once, it is often faster too use a program meant for that, like Adobe Pagemaker/Indesign, Quark etc.. Latex takes too much time to get everyting on the proper place for this kind of work.
And no Microsoft Word is also NOT meant for this. Use Microsoft Publisher if you insist of using a Microsoft program for layout (yup, I know it is childish and sucks, but I would rather use Publisher than Word for this kind of work).
Actually, you are incorrect IMHO. It is possible and even easy to do paper layouts in Latex. It's designed specifically do deal with it. Okay, Latex might not be, but Tex is. Read up on Donald Knuth. He's a very interesting guy. His Dad actually typeset things manually with an old, old, old school, put a single letter into a big box, put ink on it, press it down on paper, style printing press.
TeX can do just about anything you can think of. It is in fact a wonderful format for pre-print documentation formatting. All you do is define the style. Latex will even correctly do word breaks and "respace" the lettering. There is a technical term for it, but when it streaches the intra-letter spacing so that the lines are all the same width of a column. It was quite annoying, however, that is exactly the type of feature you need to make a paper.
LaTeX probably isn't the ideal tool for doing paper layouts for big name commercial papers, but it is quite capable for doing layouts for smaller scale papers like for a College or Community paper, it'd make a great tool. Primarily because the wrap ability around pictures sucked the last time I used it. However, if you we're willing to deal with that, it'd work great. In fact, I'll bet the Wall Street Journal's front page could easily be layed out in TeX or LaTeX.
If you really want to do API documentation, you are completely and utterly nuts to not use Doxygen in my opinion. It might have a Latex output module that you are referring to. Doxygen is just entirely too cool for API documentation. It does HTML, PS, PDF, and probably a couple of others.
Kirby
Let me second the above comment: take something you've written in another application, and LaTeX it. Play with packages, figure out what you need to do. It's the best way to learn, and you can make things work the way you want them to. Learning the internals will be the best thing you can do---LyX is cool and all, but nothing beats knowing how to do it without WYSIWYG. The links already given here are great. LaTeX rocks; enjoy it! brwski
brwski
"Because without beer, things do not seem to go as well''
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.
Once you got the hang of LaTeX it will be hard for you to go back to a word processor thoguhTry Lyx, it's fantastic. A "What You See Is What You Mean" front end to Tex. If you don't want to use it for documents, you could at least use it to write examples and then export to tex.
Versioning support and lots of yumminess.
http://www.lyx.org
Cheers,
Roger
Do you have any better hostages?
There's a document named Latex for Word Processor Users which I found incredibly helpful when I picked up LaTeX after a few years slack. It's structured according to the menus in a most word processors, which makes it easy to find the information you're looking for.
--Bud
Latex DOES have advantages, but it's still just SO limited in what it can be used for.
For example, Latex would be perfect for generating pre-filled out forms on the web. You could generate a latex template of the form, and take values in a CGI program and dynamically merge the template and the data to produce a temporary latex document, then generate a PDF from it for the web user to download and print. Problem is, latex is a BEAR to get text placed in specific places and constrained to specific rectangle areas. I tried, but never did figure that out.
Another example is creating letters with addresses located in specific places such that the address can appear in an envelope window when folded and inserted. I haven't figured that one out yet, either.
Also, I've found that documents, when they're converted ps or pdf files, don't appear the same. If you print ps output, and print out a pdf generated from that same ps, the paper representation looks different; the margins are different, where text appears is different. It's very inconsistent that way.
With all the limitations, not to mention the learning curve for non-technical types, it's really just one tool for people to use in specific instances...but it's not a general tool for everybody. Word processors are still the best general tool for generating formatted text documents.
I'm honor bound to put in a plug for George Gratzer's Math into LaTeX , which is the only book I'm aware of that covers most of the intricacies of AMS LaTeX. If you have a lot of math to write, George's book will probably tell you what you need to type (and will also probably have an example that's pretty close to what you need).
MiL also has a nice introduction to LaTeX, walking you through creating your very first LaTeX article; covers BibTeX reasonably thoroughly; and introduces you to some of the additional minutiae you should be aware of when writing a book with LaTeX.
ObAdditionalHonorableMention: I edited Math into LaTeX, but I don't see a cent from sales. I do use the book all the time when I'm trying to figure out something new or remember how to do something I haven't done for a while.
LaTeX comes with a whole suite of useful goodies, but there are some other really useful utilities you'll probably want to figure out. first is ispell (or aspell, haven't tried it), which is an interactive spell checker which (with the right cmdline switches) groks TeX (and thus LaTeX). next up is make, once your sources become fairly complicated (which for me means n >= 1 files usuall), a makefile becomes a real friend -- this way all your indices, glossaries, etc. are automagically regenerated as necessary, bibtex gets rerun as necesssary, etc. and (pdf)latex gets run until all crossreferences are resolved, if you have the right magic in your makefile.
what else... oh yeah, a couple word of advice: i'm a big fan of the amsmath and amssym packages (so math actually looks the way you expect it to). hyperref is nice if you want live links in your docs (so bibliography citations are linked to the bibliography entries, for example). i believe hyperref also lets you put in urls. there's a little weirdness in getting LaTeX to actually use an 8.5" x 11" page with 1" margins (it's fairly non-obvious). drop me a message and i'll show you the preamble that fixes this.
if you're going to be spending a lot of time writing up algorithms, a package like alg (or newalg) is pretty nice. i don't remember the specifics of its usage off hand, but if you check your handy dandy local ctan mirror (http://ctan.org), they'll have docs (+ sources) for all these packages and a ton more. there is a package which will even allow you to include C/C++/Java/Pascal/etc. code into your docs and pretty print that too (again, i forget which package, but i can check for you).
hope this helps.
As for the original poster, why not give XHTML with CSS a try?
More than mere navel gazing.
Problem is, latex is a BEAR to get text placed in specific places and constrained to specific rectangle areas. I tried, but never did figure that out.
Fine-grained control in LaTeX is possible via TeX (or even just using PostScript for the truly hard-core). Also, the whole point to LaTeX was to alleviate the burden of typesetting large documents by having the software do most of it automatically. The strength of LaTeX is literally just typing away, running the latex and dvips commands, and having a gorgeous document as a result.
Vote in November. You won't regret it.
If you print ps output, and print out a pdf generated from that same ps, the paper representation looks different; the margins are different, where text appears is different.
Be double-sure that all the tools have similar default settings. Is the PS to PDF converter assuming A4 instead of Letter or vice versa? These kind of things can lead to the inconsistency you mention. Otherwise, I have had extrememly good luck with the PS and PDF output from LaTeX.
Vote in November. You won't regret it.
I looked at Tex, and it didn't look as if you could print within a rectangle, which was placed in an arbitrary, but specified location, and wrap and/or trim within the rectangle area. Without that, data being merged into the form template has to be massaged through a script for it to appear properly on the form.
I still use Latex for some things, but I really think there's a place in the world for something that's geared more towards people with the need for more, and easier, control over the formatting, but which can still perform neat tricks like references, footnotes and TOC generation.
Because the learning curve for Latex makes the learning for XHTML and CSS look like Malcolm X.
I looked at Tex, and it didn't look as if you could print within a rectangle, which was placed in an arbitrary, but specified location, and wrap and/or trim within the rectangle area.
I haven't used them, but it looks like LaTeX's concept of "boxes" might fit the bill.
Vote in November. You won't regret it.
The humor of of your suggestion, is two fold. First, XHTML with CSS, isn't a desktop publishing tool. It can't give possibly give you any kind of control over the appearance of a document in the general case (it can if everyone decides to use the same version of the same user agent). It's a markup langauge to be rendered by the User Agent. There is some consistancy, and generally things look the same across User agents. That's about as good as it gets. Not to mention the fiasco that is printing from a Web browser. If you want to put something on the Web, a destop publishing tool isn't what you want. If you want a desktop publishing toold, and fine grained control, anything to do with HTML/XHTML/CSS is completely useless. If you just want to share information, it might be a great tool.
Second, you'll find that my original description precisely maps to making Latex act as much like a markup language as it can. Writting the macros I describe directly maps to the CSS magic described in the link. However, the beauty of it, is Latex gives you absolute precision over the layout, it will output a portable printable format. It does give you a pixel layout level of control. On top of all that, Tex must look exactly the same on all platforms. Latex is just a macro package for TeX to make it easier to use, thus it is also very consistant. If it doesn't render correctly, you lose the right to ship the underlying TeX binaries. It was the only restriction on the use of Tex as distributed by Donald Knuth. His sole purpose in doing that was to have it TeX be portable, and archivable, so that given the same source, it would render exactly the same 100 years from now. DVI, PostScript and PDF formatted documents generally look exactly the same no matter what they are rendered on.
Kirby
Boxes, as far as I can tell, can't be placed anywhere arbitrarily...like everything else, it's located with the flow of text. You can change the justification, but that's it.
At least, from what I could tell.
If I'm wrong, suffice it to say that Google didn't turn me up any answers, and learning latex in its entirety, including the practice needed to completely understand it to place text boxes in specific locations, is out of the question. I spent 3 days fighting with latex just to generate and print an plain old envelope with latex, and that pretty much did me in.
My feeling is, latex is not for formatted text. It's just for plain text, and it will automatically format plain text for very stream-like documents such as books, thesis papers, single articles, etc. into something that comes out formatted, but according to conventions, not according to your wishes. It's too much of a fight for so many other things that are done quite well with a word processor such as Word or OpenOffice.
Latex gives you pixel-level control? How? I beat my head into a pulp looking for such control...how do you place things in very specific places? What reference documents that?
You can't compare html and css with LaTeX. MathML is nowhere near being generally usable, and html is for web browsers, not printed material. Maybe the css style sheets for printed material will come along well enough one day, but nearly everything serious that has been published in the last decade that contains a substantial amount of math formulae was done in TeX. There just isn't a reasonable substitute out there.
ciao
If you want to check it out, the creator wrote a free (GPL) implementation named "Basser" Lout (after his university IIRC), which comes with loads of documentation and runs on Linux (Debian offers a package, dunno about other distros), other unices, and Windows.
Oh, and like TeX, you can do maths stuff with it, but the equations are expressed in a format based on eqn instead. Luckily that has a whole chapter dedicated to it in the docs. There's some sort of extra package that offers "TeX style" maths, but it seems that's just in terms of fonts; that too is described in the docs.
The Lout sourceforge page was started fairly recently as a repository for Lout info, in case you have a tough time finding much.
Be careful! New moon tonight.
Learn the keyboard shortcuts in MathType (the equation editor found in Microsoft Word and AppleWorks).
It's much faster and looks much better than LaTeX.
I use it on my joystick.
Oh I'm sure you can do it, but I think there is a rather big gap between the "small paper" which can use LaTeX/TeX since they have a really simple layout and the really big paper which has the kind of resources to make a fully automated system.
My experience from doing Highschool papers / yearbook designs was that there was a pretty tight feedback from layout to writer. So every now and then a few words were added or removed to make columns line up better and stuff like that. Also the individual page designs were pretty much freely made by hand. (Well we used Pagemaker, but it wasn't automatic.)
If you have a real newspaper I bet they use a lot of automated tools instead to do all that. Just tell the program the general layout of the paper and let it schedule the articles to best fill the space. Such a system could use LaTeX I bet, but it wouldn't be trivial to contruct. (It wouldn't be trivial in any language.)
My only grouse was that the poster I was responding to didn't comment on the grandparent's point that Latex, apparently, didn't allow layout placement, but instead went off on a rant on why such control is unnecessary.
More than mere navel gazing.
That's not an error. It's a warning, and an insignificant one at that. It says that the degree of stretching LaTeX had to do to fully-justify that line was more than LaTeX's tastes appreciated. LaTeX is telling you that if you wanted to be anal about it, you could try to rearrange your text to make it look prettier. Word wouldn't even do that -- you'd never know.
You might have the best text layout program but what's the use when the results look like amost any book by Springer-Varlag.
Blah blah blah, rant rant rant - I'm trying to ask whats the quickest way to use Times ... ;-)
"...normal evolution would have gone Word to Frame to troff, but instead, the computer industry has gone the other way!"
In the days of Mac OS, I used Alpha which was a very good editor, BibTeX for bibliography and OzTeX to compile the documents. Now, as a Mac OS X user, I rely on TeXShop for the editor and teTeX for the backend. However, I find that TeXShop is not that great for me. I am not a good typist so I find having to type TeX stuff a bit annoying since I am used to using shortcuts in Alpha. Also, TeXShop takes a while to load up big documents as it parses and colorizes different part of the text. teTeX is great even though it took me a while to figure out how to get .sty and .cls files recognized.
/Applications. It won't run if it's moved to /Application/Typeset, which sorta reminds me why I hate Windows. I like organizing my /Application directory. Another problem is with BibDesk 0.85 which won't run (The application BibDesk unexpectedly quits). It is quite surprising to me that OS X TeX apps are not polished since TeX has been very strong in UNIX systems.
I installed LyX, but the annoying part is, it insists to be installed in
Actualy TeX was written as part of the web2c documentation system, and Knuth's literate programming philosophy, so it's initial purpose was program Documentation; LaTeX is an environment for TeX that's a lot more human readable than raw TeX code.
Often I find that using LaTeX is faster than a word processor, because with a WP the rendering has to occure concurently with every little change. In LaTeX it's an edit, compile, then render cycle so I wait until the are big enough to justify the compile.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
grow up little boy.
has anyone tried writing math on a tablet pc?
Yes, it does! I tried MS-Word, OO.org and xmlresume before switching back to good old LaTeX and the excellent res class.
That is why, they created Open Books
I am surprised that no-one has mentioned TeXmacs. Brilliant and powerful. I use emacs for my LaTeX editing, but this is really cool and actively maintained.
Languages aren't inherently fast -- implementations are efficient
To manage your BibTeX database, use Pybliographer. It has a simple GUI, and it even integrates well with LyX. If both applications are running, just hit the Cite button in Pybliographer, and the cross-reference is inserted into your LyX document!
My only criticism of Pybliographer is that it can be a little cumbersome to install, depending on what distro you are running, because it requires Python and a particular version of the GNU Recode library.
My wife, who isn't much of a computer expert, wanted to write her thesis in LaTeX because she thinks the results look good and because she heard horror stories about MS Word eating large documents. She had no prior knowledge of LaTeX, and wouldn't be interested in learning it. I set her up with LyX and Pybliographer, and she was quite happy with the whole thing. For the rare occasions requiring layout tweaking, we used Kopka & Daly's A Guide to LaTeX 2e as a reference.
MathType is a great tool to convert all of your word equations to latex as well. If you start from scratch, they have a free editor to create latex equations.
Kile, the KDE Integrated LaTeX Environment, is a pretty powerful LaTeX IDE for KDE. It has toolbars and menus that will be of major assistance, and has commands that automate certain things, like creating a skeletal structure for your document.
Of course, you'll need more than that--an IDE can't teach you everything. I particularly like this LaTeX tutorial--it was the first one I found when I first started learning LaTeX a little over a year ago, and it's pretty good for starting one off.
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Until LyX 1.4 is released and has full-native support for Memoir and other packages I have been using Kile LaTeX Editor for KDE 3.2.2 (1.7a version currently).
When I want to see exactly what code is doing what Kile is that sort of LaTeX editor but with many helpful features that don't completely hide the code that LyX does for you.
When LyX releases 1.4 and subsequent 1.4.x releases to refine it my time will be 50/50 along-side Kile.
Besides the texts that are currently being listed I didn't read anywhere about the INDIAN TEX USER GROUP TUTORIALS, available http://www.tug.org/tutorials/tugindia/ You won't be disappointed when you view these.
The print versions are ones I prefer but having both shows one the versatility in LaTeX/TeX.
All I can say after reading several hundred pages of LaTeX this past month, the more you read the more you want to never use anything else for large document processing.