LaTeX

Why LATEX?

The advantages of LaTeX are that

1. It's free.

2. It's available for many machines.

3. LaTeX files are ASCII and are portable. Because they're ASCII it's easy to discover how someone achieved an effect.

4. You can use the editor of your choice.

5. The typesetting's better, especially the maths.

6. Style changes are neater in LaTeX. Style files for many periodicals exist. Many Word users don't use styles or templates, and there's a limit to what can be done.

7. LaTeX is extensible. If you want a new feature, you can look around for a free add-on or write one yourself.

8. LaTeX's floats are no more awkward than Word's anchored frames, and the latter don't always work well.

Disadvantages are

1. Font selection is difficult compared to selection in Word and Framemaker.

2. LaTeX's not good at flowing text around pictures.

3. LaTeX encourages (almost insists on) structured writing and the separation of style from content. This is not the way that many people (especially non-programmers) are used to working.

4. Without a WYSIWYG front end, it's not always easy to find out how to do things.

For details, see Why LATEX?.


Short Introduction

There is a wonderful short introduction to LATEX by Wenguang Wang.

For more, see the official site www.latex-project.org

For Chinese version, see http://www.ctex.org


Math Symbols in LATEX

This is what I really interested in. There is a great introduction by on AMS site. This is a PDF file. A simpler web-based symbol list can be find at LaTex Math Symbols.