Tips and tools for managing LaTeX
Powerful Format
LaTeX has a reputation for being difficult to use, but mainly it just requires patience. We provide a quick overview to get you up and running.
Lamport TeXt (LaTeX) is one of free software's legendary applications [1]. Before LibreOffice or AbiWord, it was the most advanced tool on Linux for formatting text. Even today, it is widely used in the academic sciences and in some publishing houses. Users speak of compiling their first lengthy document in LaTeX in the same way others talk of compiling their first Linux kernel, and several professors tell me that students regularly have to be prevented from obsessing over LaTeX at the expense of their research.
LaTeX has a reputation for being difficult, but not because of its complexity. Instead, the difficulty lies in the size of the project. Adding to the difficulty is the number of editors designed for it, including extensions for both Vim and Emacs [2], as well as LyX, a graphical interface [3]. The difficulty in learning LaTeX does not lie in the concepts, as much as in finding the right tools.
At its heart, though, LaTeX is actually simple. Basically, it is a combination of a markup language similar to HTML and a collection of formatting macros. Creating a document in LaTeX consists of three steps:
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