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LaTeX - Why and for what?
in Applications
A few months ago, I read a bit about LaTeX and TeX in generall. I found it pretty handy, especially the fact that I could create PDFs without using any other programm than a text-editor. No Office and stuff required. Im currently using LaTeX for Documentations for my Customers.
Who else uses LaTeX? And what for?
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When I have the choice I prefer to use plain tex (instead of latex).
It's true that at first it was used mostly for writing math articles/books
but it's no longer true.
Physicists, chemists, linguists, or anybody that just wants nicely
formatted pages ...
you can typeset anything with it (including music scores, ...).
I also have my CV written in LaTeX. It's nice because gives special and fresh look and feel.
http://wawrzek.name/CV/cv.pdf
Now I write anything in Latex, whenever I need to write a paper / article / manual / anything-else I do it in Latex.
After one writes his own templates and gets the "themes" he likes, I can guarantee that nobody will go back.
It gives a very professional look and after you get used to it, it's not harder than writing normal text.
Don't forget to use an appropriate editor; macros are a must have, they just push up productivity by orders of magnitude
thecec
It's good for any letters (manual and automated created), posters, music notes, good presentations, books (can handle thousands of pages perfectly) and much more.
The letters look perfectly, much better than OpernOffice or so. It is a Text SETTING SYSTEM, not only a pdf-creator.
Try out.
kinds of stuff: writing letters, resumes, math articles,
documentation, goofy stuff... You can even write music scores,
guitar tablatures, crossword puzzles... It's so flexible.
All you need really (aside from the compiler) is a text editor.
You can even do everything from the CLI, without bothering to open
an X session. I do that quite often.
There are a number of framebuffer tools that can display the output (pics, pdf ...)
It's a great tool. It allows you to create really professional math documents, as well as documents for other things. It has document classes for articles, books, letters, and AMS (American Mathematical Society) articles.
Some of you might also be interested in GraphViz. It is basically to diagrams what LaTeX is to documents, and it is supposed to integrate nicely in TeX through the dot2tex module. I have yet to play with it, but it is certainly on my todo-list