LaTeX for Windows

[liloe]

So I don't know who of you has used LaTeX before, but I'm most likely gonna give an Office+LaTeX course at university next semester (that is in 1 week, lol) and I wanted to ask, if any of you has a preferred LaTeX editor for Windows. I have a good one for Mac, but we don't have Mac's at university, soooo that's kinda not possible =)

First of all it should be rather easy to use, even if its functionality is a bit decreased. It's not about a formation for professionnal layouters, it's about showing language students how to use a few tools to make their life easier/better and a lot of them don't know much about computers (that's what I got told).

 

[Cadelin]

I use LateX alot now I am writing my thesis but I also have a mac!

When I used windows (2 years ago) I used: TeXnicCenter which can be found here

I am not sure if it supports pdflatex but it is certainly fairly easy to use.

 

[tris-]

it looks confusing as fuck, and the same thing surely can be achieved in office?

it says you gotta type this

\documentclass{article}
\title{Cartesian closed categories and the price of eggs}
\author{Jane Doe}
\date{September 1994}
\begin{document}
\maketitle
Hello world!
\end{document}

to make it display

Cartesian closed categories and the price of eggs
Jane Doe
September 1994

Hello world!

i mean wtf is all that about? i dont wannna have to type code in.

 

[Cadelin]

it looks confusing as fuck, and the same thing surely can be achieved in office?

hahahahahahahaha!

LateX is primarily for producing scientific documents. If you are trying to write a document with lots of diagrams and mathematical notation in there is nothing else around that has the same flexibility and power LateX has.

 

[liloe]

Off-topic, but for you tris ^^

LaTeX doesn't have all the features of Word for fast typing and neither does it have a grammar/spell checker (at least not a good one), but you can't achieve the same level of quality when it comes to generating the text.

LaTeX offers a much more professional way of layouting your text, due to the WYMYWYG approach (vs. WYSIWYG from Word). If you want your text exactly 3 dots more to the right, then LaTeX will do it...Word won't.

LaTeX will do exactly what you want, but ofc that requires some orders =)

EDIT: File to show off should be attached now.

 

[Iceforge]

TeXnicCenter is pretty good!

Also, an advantage of LaTex over word is that you can write up 1 paper in unlimited number of small files that you then combine in a master.

Then you define font type, font size and headline sizes, everything in the master, meanign that all you have to define while writing is what is headline type 1, headline type 2, mean text, etc.

This also means that you can have 5 people sitting around the globe writting in different files that are actually all parts of the same bigger master document, they just upload it (preferably through SVN (sp?)) and then you render the LaTex master to get a fine .pdf document that is stunningly well done with formatting, compared to haveing had 5 different authors.

 

[liloe]

Grml, file didn't get attached for some reason. I'll attach a .zip which contains the "codefile" and the .pdf I created. It's all German, but that shouldn't be the problem. You'll hardly be able to get the same effect with Word =)

Ahh damn, the zip is too big, that's why =)

So here goes the link: Clicky

EDIT: and before you comment, I got a good mark for it

 

[crispy]

TeXnicCenter is pretty good!

Also, an advantage of LaTex over word is that you can write up 1 paper in unlimited number of small files that you then combine in a master.

Then you define font type, font size and headline sizes, everything in the master, meanign that all you have to define while writing is what is headline type 1, headline type 2, mean text, etc.

This also means that you can have 5 people sitting around the globe writting in different files that are actually all parts of the same bigger master document, they just upload it (preferably through SVN (sp?)) and then you render the LaTex master to get a fine .pdf document that is stunningly well done with formatting, compared to haveing had 5 different authors.

Pff SVN... use git you foo!

 

[liloe]

Soooo, thanks for all the replies =)) (woot, I made Iceforge a bubble)

They have TeXnicCenter installed on the machines there, which seems to be a good thing then =)

 

[Ingafgrinn Macabre]

I'm astonished that on this forum, noone replied with anything about a certain other application of latex..... :touch:

I use MiKTeX by the way, on windows. Has a nice package manager, but no WYGIWYW editor like LyX.
I'm using Notepad++ as a file editor, then make a batch file with something like

rem parse.bat
@echo off
latex %1
makeindex %1
latex %1
makeindex %1
latex %1

 

[liloe]

I'm astonished that on this forum, noone replied with anything about a certain other application of latex..... :touch:

I use MiKTeX by the way, on windows. Has a nice package manager, but no WYGIWYW editor like LyX.
I'm using Notepad++ as a file editor, then make a batch file with something like

rem parse.bat
@echo off
latex %1
makeindex %1
latex %1
makeindex %1
latex %1

This isn't exactly easy to use though =)) The point is, it must be very easy with a good editor, as I'm not giving a complete programming course =)