Writing Math Notes?

sponsoredwalk

Say I wanted to make a PDF math book without a laborious study of TEX,
how would I do that? I'm sure professors have an easy way to make
PDF's of lecture notes for their students with all the beautiful latex
equations on the page, is there an easy way I can do this without
dealing with command line inputs, i.e. a nice stress-free GUI?

The solution I have now would be to write the entire book in a boards.ie
window I have a cool firefox addon that allows me to pre-screen the
latex I've made & I know how to work with the basics, i.e.

f(x) = \sum_{k=0}^{\infty } \frac{ f^{k} (a) }{ k! } (x - a)^k

is

[latex] f(x) = \sum_{k=0}^{\infty } \frac{ f^{k} (a) }{ k! } (x - a)^k [/latex]

That's great & about as easy as I'd expect it to get but I see some
ridiculously long things on the various links I've checked, i.e.

\begin
\font.
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{graphicx}

\begin{document}

\title{Introduction to \LaTeX{}}
\author{Author's Name}


yada yada yada

\end

All this weird code, is there an easy alternative? I can't really use this
boards.ie window thing even as I can only view what I've written on
here

equivariant

put simply, learn LaTeX.

If you want to typeset any mathematical document that is more than one page long, then LaTeX the ONLY way worth doing it. It is not that hard - if you can do basic stuff on boards, you already have a decent start.

Things like Scientific workplace/word equation editors/etc will end up driving you nuts and costing waaaaaaaay more time than the few hours it will take to understand how to use LaTeX. In spite oif what you think, GUI's are not "stress free" at all when it comes to the task of typesetting. Also, LaTeX is free and platform independent.

In summary, advantages of LaTeX - professional looking output, easy to use, much less time required, LaTeX is free and platform independent,.... (there are many other advantages, but these are the most obvious)

advantages of other systems over LaTeX - absolutely NONE.


PS Some hardcore people of a certain age will advocate the use of TeX rather than LaTeX, but I think that LaTeX is much easier to use than TeX. I am not a TeXpert however, so I am open to correction here.

sponsoredwalk

Cool thanks a lot for the tip, I suppose you're right tbh, I came across
Miktex yesterday & got pretty intimidated but apparently Latex is it's
own program too. Any advice or tips on good sources to learn this?

Eliot Rosewater

Try Lyx. Very easy to use. It's what I generally use at the moment, but I'm learning LaTeX for my latest assignment.

If you're using Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install lyx

henbane

TexWorks worked well for me in my last lengthy assignment. Ctrl+T compiles/previews your work pretty quickly in windows (I assume there's a similar shortcut whatever you're on). I found miktex a bit slower for previews as I kept alt+tabbing back to the editor and then failing to compile the doc until I closed the acrobat preview but that was more of a mental block I had than a real complaint about it.

Clinker

You could check out the LaTeX forum. MiKTeX is a suite of programs for running TeX/LaTeX on windows. It now includes its own editor, so it's all you need, but a lot of people use other editors.

Don't waste time: learn LaTeX! A rough few days and then it's easy!

bnt

Another vote for LyX here: I've actually used it on an Ubuntu netbook in lectures, taking down notes and formulas from the board. You learn the keystrokes pretty quickly, e.g. Shift-Ctrl-M inserts a formula, and Shift-Ctrl-M again changes it to an inline formula. The syntax in the formula is mostly standard LaTeX: ^ for superscript, _ for subscript etc. Alt-M, F inserts a fraction, and so on. (It also works nicely as an outliner for general notes, it's easy to divide your notes up in to sections & subsections etc. )

sponsoredwalk

Yeah I'm giving Lyx a shot first, I've been installing it all evening literally
almost done now just installing missing packages. The screenshots
make it look amazing with drop down toolbars etc... I think it's exactly
what I was looking for. Cheers for the keystrokes

gerry87

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX is a great reference for when you're stuck on something.

Fringe

Gummi is an editor for Linux that has a live preview.

Delphi91

If you're gonna use LaTex under Linux, then Kile is your man - very easy to use and formats the source code very well. Has a load of features, including production of both postscript and pdf versions of the document.

Killer Pigeon

I use LyX with MiKTeX to write up lab reports. With LyX I don't really have to learn the code, it does it for me.

/lazy.