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Where Can I find Sources for Learning LaTex?

Posted by Cliff on from the writing-papers-with-complex-equations dept.

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?"

1 of 116 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I started learning LaTeX some months ago by astaines · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    *Rant*
    I hate BibTeX. I'm a life scientist and BibTeX is the main reason I don't use LaTeX.

    First BibTeX is an undocumented nightmare. I speak as someone who learned Forth as their second programming language.

    2) Bibliographic tools used in my discipline don't play well with BibTeX. I still don't know of any BibTeX style to produce Vancouver formatted references, which completely dominate medical journals. (I could probably write one, but life is too short, see 1)

    3) BibTeX documentation usually assumes that you already know everything about how it works. Lamport's book has a good short introduction, but it's not really enough. (There's a useful MSc. thesis from LS Abd Rahmin. This is worth looking at as it has a nice introduction to the whole area, and a careful examination of some of the existing tools.)

    4)Integrating BibTex into a document processing workflow, for example for meta-analysis or annotation, seems to be basically impossible.

    5) BibTex is great if you write statistical or mathematical papers, otherwise, forget it. It is far harder to use than other reference handling systems. It does work on Linux, which EndNote reallly doesn't, but thats about it.
    *End Rant*

    In fairness to BibTeX it set out to solve a very specific problem, and solves it very well, however the problem space has moved on rather sharply since.

    There is a dire need for an Open source competitor to EndNote/Reference Manager. A combination of RefDb and OpenOffice could do it, but BibTex won't.

    Anthony Staines

    --
    -- Anthony Staines