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EnglishWriting, whether you do it for work reports, your thesis, a paper you are working on. In general it arrives that we ask ourselves if indeed we have been using the right tool for the simple reason that the output does not really reflect what you wanted.
If you are a casual writer then formatting tools like Ms Word or Open-Appache must suits you better but for profesional writers, from technical papers to newspapers there is what we call LaTeX specially designed for those purposes.
LaTeX, which is pronounced «Lah-tech» or «Lay-tech» (to rhyme with «blech» or «Bertolt Brecht»), is a document preparation system for high-quality typesetting. It is most often used for medium-to-large technical or scientific documents but it can be used for almost any form of publishing.
It may seem cumbersome, at the beginning but once one overcomes the (steep) learning curve of LaTeX, the realization of its advantages means that there is no turning back:
- Mathematical equations of unbeatable quality.
- Easy generation of all kind of indices, bibliography, cross references, etc.
- allows you to focus on the text content, instead of its appearance. In theory, a text prepared according to the guidelines of a specific journal may be made to fit another’s style by just using one external style file. In practice, sometimes one finds some incompatibilities, but in all cases it is orders of magnitude faster, cleaner and easier than manually changing all the formatting details in Word.
- It is completely machine independent, Word is not
- It is free, Word is not
- Backward and forward compatible, Word is not
You want to give it a try ? 🙂 YES , then check the links bellow for the installation process and how to get started.
Let’s Write effectively and consistently