Weekend learning: LaTeX

I've always been amazed by the type quality of the technical papers like IEEE and ACM. I always wanted to  produce my documents in such high quality. I learned that they were not written in any normal text editor or word processor like MS Word, but were specially type set using a framework called LaTex (pronounced 'lay-tek'). I looked up on the internet and read some articles on LaTeX but found the framework very powerful and intimidating. And so, I put off investing any effort in learning this framework.

Last month, I bought a text book on Compiler theory (the classic red dragon book) and found that the book had been written entirely in LaTeX. I was taken by the beauty of the typesetting in that book. And this triggered the urge in me to learn LaTeX. So I started off my efforts into learning this new tool and downloaded the tools needed from an internet site. It's free of cost and comes with everything you need to produce documents ranging from a simple article to books - compilers, language packs, style packs, text editor, PDF viewer and much more. Now on to more about using LaTeX itself.

LaTeX is a typesetting program originally written by Donald Knuth (yes, 'the Donald Knuth') from a need to produce high quality, standard way of producing technical papers including lot of math symbols. Later it was developed by many people in the open source community and is now a collection of great tools. LaTeX is a very intelligent program that frees you from all the typesetting headaches while you are writing a document. Imagine all the fiddling you need to do with the rulers, sections, etc. in MS Word while trying to write a moderately complex document such as a project report or a thesis. LaTeX allows you to focus on the content leaving all the typesetting headache to it. In a typical scenario, one writes the document and embeds a few 'commands' which direct the LaTeX system to typeset the content. It might be a little confusing at first, but there's great documentation to get started with and also there's a vibrant community to help you.

There's a lot more that you can produce using LaTeX apart from just technical papers. Over the period of time since it's inception, people have extended the capabilities of LaTeX to produce a variety of documents including - articles, letters, flyers, presentations (yes, the Powerpoint ones), mind maps, chemical composition diagrams, etc. At this point, I think I've said enough about LaTeX and I think you should start using it. I've included some references here which contain great information about LaTeX.

Have fun, happy TeXing :)

Resources:

1. http://www.latex-project.org/ - the main source for everything LaTeX.
2. http://www.tug.org/protext/ - software for LaTeX in Windows.
3. http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX - the awesome book!
4. http://latex-project.org/guides/ - other collection of good documentation.

P.S. I am not propagating against MS Word here, I would still love to write small, regular documents using MS Word. LaTeX can be very time consuming, so I suggest you to go for it only if there's a pressing need.