I have been using WinEdit, and LEd, but I haven’t been able to find a split-screen option (where you can essentially have multiple windows on the same file open to edit different parts simultaneously) like my beloved nedit in linux. Does anybody know of a good Windows editor to do this or know how to do it for either WinEdit or LEd?
I take it Emacs is not an option?
Well, that is pretty cool. I figured it would only run under Cygwin and if I was going to do that I may just as well run nedit. But to be honest, emacs is just too darn complicated for me. I wanted something that basically works just like Winedit but with a split screen button.
Back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and I had to use a Windows machine to edit LaTeX, I used WinEdt (not WinEdit). It’s pretty strongly Tex-inclined, and I’m pretty sure you can open multiple files in either tiled windows or (what I found more useful) tabs.
Oh, and amusingly enough, the WinEdt home page is the first Google result when searching for both “WinEdt” and “WinEdit”. If that’s not a good endorsement, I’m not sure what is.
Out of curiosity, what is so damn cool about LaTex? I mean, why not just use Word printed out to PDF?
I look at the websites created by these compilers or whatever they are and I cannot imagine that there people are overly design oriented in any sense.
LaTeX is a typesetting program for creating technical and scientific documents. It’s primarily for printed documents (journal articles, books, manuals, etc). It’s the standard format for submitting articles to scientific journals. It wasn’t designed for creating web site and I agree it doesn’t work all that well for this purpose, but PDF and PostScript output is usually very good.
LaTeX handles equations much better than Word, in my opinion. It’s also great for large documents - citations, placement and numbering of figures, references, bibliography, etc. are all automated.
Well threemae I sometimes ask that myself. Especially since you always have to compile the darn thing.
Unfortunately, it is still pretty much the best option for scientific papers. I’m writing one now that is around 40 pages, full of equations and cross-references. A number of years ago I used to use word, but for articles this big, file sizes would balloon up, formatting would often be pretty strange, and most importantly, the equations never looked very good.
Also, most journals now accept submissions directly in latex files (and sometimes in word too but not always). You incorporate their desired style macros, and your article is magically in the exact format they like. Another consideration for me is that I’m often switching between linux and windows depending on the computer I’m using. It is conventient to have something that looks the same in both places.
I’m sure Word is much better now, but there is too much inertia for me to change now I think. My only hope is that younger generations can learn from my story.
Heh, I just realised that I’m using WinEdt, not Winedit. I did exactly that, searched for winedit and downloaded from the first link I saw. Never noticed the spelling difference.
No, this and what scr4 said make a great deal of sense. It actually seems like a pretty cool idea. I always assumed that there was some intern at Nature copying and pasting text into layout software. I guess that’s wht LaTex is/does. Ignorance fought.