I’m using the LYX front-end. Damn, I never thought I could actually have such good looking equations so easily.
Okay I came in here expecting to see some latex dammit!
Nothing? Do you have anything in rubber?
Who’s got good looking equations? Oh, Balduran, how you doin’?
Hee hee Attrayant! Part of the reason dorks like using word processor a like LaTeX (accidentally capped the e in the title) is it makes us sound wild.
: ladyfoxfyre swoons before my 12 pt Times New Roman and Helvetica iso8859-1 fonts :
a word processor like
Of course, I’m not one of those dorks.
LaTeX is sweet. Congrats on finding it. :
:
And remember, always practice safe math. Encode all documents in LaTeX! [borrowed from a friend]
Except that when you say LaTeX, the ending is a “ch” (as in loch) sound, not “ks.” Oof, I’m a geek.
On a less dorky note, we used to have a DJ on our local community radio station who went by the name of Elmo Latex.
Yeah! now I’ve got a new joke to tell at my next D&D game!
I’ll consider artistic liscense Earth
It’s true that there’s nothing like trying to format some documentation in Word to make you appreciate LaTEX. I have no idea how the text processor that 95% of the country relies on gets away with being so lame at handling diagrams and captions.
What? Not Computer Modern? How will people know it’s LaTeX if it’s notin Computer Modern?
Another LaTeX lover here. That program can do anything.
I have a love/hate relationship to it. It’s powerful and easy get great looking equations (once you know how), and actually everything looks awesome with it. On the other hand, it’s hell. When doing word processing, should you really have to worry about whether your document will compile or not? It’s pretty much a usability nightmare all around. I’ll have to check out the LYX front end.
I did my dissertation in LaTeX - department requirement, IIRC - but given my druthers, I’d have preferred Word with Equation Editor. Maybe the formulas wouldn’t have looked quite as neat, but it would have been a hell of a lot easier.
I wrote my Master’s thesis and a half-dozen papers in Word and Word Perfect and I was getting damn sick and tired of having to set them on 5 minute backups to protect my work and my equations looking like my cat barfed them out.
Now that I’m doing my Doctoral thesis, I didn’t want to go through that again. I always hesitated to use LaTex before because I didn’t want to learn yet another programming language. LYX makes it really easy though, you don’t have to worry about coding in all the mundane things, it has a little point and click equation editor, point and click figure and table insertion and for the difficult stuff, it has a LaTeX console. It’s like Scientific Workplace but good. Right now my thesis is crap, but it’s the best looking crap I’ve ever written.
Oh, no…::shivers:: I’d much rather play in LaTeX than deal with the hell that is Equation Editor…even Math Type.
LYX? Bah! Real men code LaTeX from scratch.
Hey now, if you’re going to turn this into a “my pocket protector is bigger than yours”, we’d better step into the pit. 
Guess what? I’m gonna one-up all y’all:
This one time, at band camp (OK, it was actually at university) I met and talked to Donald E. Knuth, the dude who invented TeX.
And I got him to sign my copy of the first volume of The Art of Computer Programming.
OK, I’ll admit it, I’m jealous.
bows humbly
We’re not worthy! We’re not worthy!