LaTeX is neat

My logic professor encouraged his students to emulate his use of LaTeX to do our problem sets. For a couple of weeks, I was too busy to set aside a couple of hours to install everything and learn the first few ropes, but I am really glad that I chose to do so. I have been using it for practically any purpose I can think of since.

LaTeX, if you don't know, is a computer language for typesetting. It is old (Donald Knuth old), free, and stable. The only thing that might make you hesitate about using it is that you can't think of a reason why you would want to learn a typesetting language when you already have LibreOffice or whatever installed for all your word processing needs.

But it is really nice to have the manual control over layout that you get with markup languages, rather than WYSIWYG interfaces. (Not that there aren't WYSIWYG-ish editors, for the nervous-but-interested.)  Being able to split the source document into several files is nice too.

But mostly what is nice about LaTeX is that, with the small learning curve behind you, you can just worry about content. No pulling down a drop-down list and dialog so that you can insert weird characters, or edit table properties, etc. (Of course, admittedly, you'll probably have a browser open to the LaTeX wikibook most of the time.)

Although LaTeX really shines for letting you easily embed mathematical/technical formulae into plain text, even if you are only writing plain English you will love this shit. I am using LaTeX to write the facilitator's manual for the prison volunteering program I help run. It's something like 40 pages right now, much of that a nice Table of Contents and big section headings and crap, but I need to pay zero attention to layout. Pictures and such are laid out very professionally, and indeed it is all about the paragraph word spacing. Everyone told you not to use justified text settings on your word processor, because it looks like crap. But in LaTeX it looks great, because there are some really deep algorithms running down there that are adjusting the word spacing throughout the entire paragraph (not for each line at a time), and it looks faboo.

If you're interested, I'll direct you to my professor's page on using LaTeX, since he does a nice job of providing links for multiple platforms, editors, &c.