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?"

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[Tomble]

There's a system named "Lout" that was created in the early 90's (after 8 years of research!!) that's sort of similar to TeX and LaTeX, but has some nice advantages. EG: It isn't designed around US-ASCII, it produces postscript directly (and uses PS fonts), it's very flexible and easy to configure and write macros for, it's abosultely tiny compared to TeX, etc etc.

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.