Love, Hate, and LaTeX

You know, now that I put that title into type, I think that, in a more perverse context, it would make a great name for a smash hit on Broadway... but alas, I am talking about LaTeX. Yes, why on earth would I be learning LaTeX? It's summer! The story went something like this: I wanted to take some notes on something mathematical when I got home from work. I decided it would look pretty if typeset. When I opened OpenOffice.org's equation editor, I shuddered and closed it immediately. When I came back to my computer, I saw a book published by Springer sitting on the floor. All of their books are typeset the same, and they're done very beautifully using none other than LaTeX. So I spent the last four hours haggling with my computer and the internet trying to figure out the markup, build things, set up usable editors, etc.

It was a painful process, but it works, and math is now very, very pretty and formatted neatly. Although the output looks so very elegant, the markup language is fairly miserable, involving convoluted combinations of backslashes, underscores, and lots of curly brackets. My wrist is starting to hurt a little from having to reach all of these awkward keystrokes repeated. So the moral is that while you may develop repetitive strain injury in the process, at least you'll have something very neat and readable in the end. Needless to say, unless it's absolutely unacceptable, pen and paper works for me!