I dunno, I've looked at all this LaTex stuff and it's another thing I have to learn. Microsoft Equation seems adequate enough for my needs. I really have to agree with DaBono on this. I'm used to Word, and my report is 99.9999% text and formatting. LaTex seems like too much work for so little gain. A lot of the features mentioned (such as seperation of content and formatting, output of differing formats etc.) are of little use to someone writing a report, and the useful ones are actually available in Word. Why use a chainsaw when all you need is a pair of scissors?

Quote:Original post by lucem
TeXmacs is just an (old) try to give the TeX system a WYSIWYG-interface.

That sounds a bit like flaming but I have to defend my favorite editor ;)

The UI of TeXmacs looks horrible, true, but fortunately it is at most 10% of the whole program (perhaps this is what you meant by old). The beauty of the program lies in the whole philosophy. The point is that TeXmacs isn't a try to give the TeX system an interface, what is left of TeX in TeXmacs is pretty much just the fonts. Furthermore TeXmacs _can_ be an (extensible) interface to many softwares.

Here are few paragraphs from the TeXmacs site showing that TeXmacs is much more that just an interface to TeX or LaTeX:

"GNU TeXmacs is a free wysiwyw (what you see is what you want) editing platform with special features for scientists. The software aims to provide a unified and user friendly framework for editing structured documents with different types of content (text, graphics, mathematics, interactive content, etc.). The rendering engine uses high-quality typesetting algorithms so as to produce professionally looking documents, which can either be printed out or presented from a laptop.

The software includes a text editor with support for mathematical formulas, a small technical picture editor and a tool for making presentations from a laptop. Moreover, TeXmacs can be used as an interface for many external systems for computer algebra, numerical analysis, statistics, etc. New presentation styles can be written by the user and new features can be added to the editor using the Scheme extension language. A native spreadsheet and tools for collaborative authoring are planned for later."

Quote:Original post by jjd

Quote:Original post by TheOddMan
I really have to agree with DaBono on this. I'm used to Word, and my report is 99.9999% text and formatting.

I'm doing my dissertation at the moment and I'm having to write out a *lot* of formulas into my report.

So do you have a lot of formulae to write or not? Like I said, Word is fine for many things, but not for a dissertation with lots of formulae.

I would have written "Word is fine for many things but not for a dissertation with lots of formulae, text or formatting".

My experiences are quite old now, but LaTeX (combined with BibTex) was excellent for writing my PhD thesis and various papers. People using Word had a lot of troubles, as did I on the few occasions I was forced to use it.

It's probably not worth learning LaTeX just to overcome some minor short-term niggles, but if you plan to be writing more things like this in the future it's worth putting the effort in, in my opinion.

If you have lots of equations to do, use LaTeX. That's probably it's most important feature: it's excellent at formatting maths. It's not really very difficult to pick up, and since it's designed for scientific reports I imagine your work is perfectly suited to it.