Latex resources

Exams are over for another 6 months, so I’m starting work on next year’s project. Because I’m going to be producing 10-20 000 words in total for my Masters report, and also writing course material, I have decided it’s time to raise my sights above Microsoft Word. I love beauty, I love the flow of well-typeset prose… all of which points to Latex.

The problem is… I am actually a very visual person. Sure I program, but only if the code I write is colour coded. My other hobbies are much more artistic. So writing Latex commands by hand is not attractive.

I’ve therefore been casting around for visual latex editors. 3 years of being a student is taking its toll, so I’m not buying any software (incidentally, I’m undertaking freelance web design/programming work over the summer - “contact me”:peter@mapledesign.co.uk if you have a project that needs completing).

Ideally any solution would run on Windows XP as that’s what I’m used to and have everything else running on.

I first looked at “LyX”:http://www.lyx.org/ which I remembered from the past. However its Windows port didn’t seem to have progressed far (previously I’d tried it and had problems), so I continued looking.

If I wanted to write LaTex by hand, “LaTeX Editor”:http://www.latexeditor.org/ looks ideal, and definitely worth anyone checking out as a replacement for WinEdit.

One option could be to use OpenOffice. There are some interesting addons to help with LaTeX - “OOoLatexEquation”:http://www.fyma.ucl.ac.be/wiki/~piroux/OOo macro to allow Latex equations to be inserted into OpenOffice documents; or an “export converter”:http://www.hj-gym.dk/~hj/writer2latex/ to produce LaTex files from OpenOffice documents.

While not free (I’m weakening…) “BaKoMa TeX Word”:http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/systems/win32/bakoma/ promises “true WYSIWYG LaTeX editing”. I haven’t given it a test drive yet, but will do so very soon.

As the report I’m producing isn’t terribly mathematical, maybe I am wrong in looking at LaTeX to provide decent typesetting? Perhaps there’s another solution that would work just as well?

Particularly for course material (which is for an introductory programming course) I’m very tempted to write it in XHTML, as I wamt the online course notes to be interactive with quizzes etc. Although then I have the problem of getting nicely-formatted printed notes…