authoring math documents (tex?)

Stephen Ryan stephen at sryanfamily.info
Mon Jun 11 20:29:58 EDT 2007


On Mon, 2007-06-11 at 18:38 -0400, Lloyd Kvam wrote:
> My daughter is heading back to school and will need to write Math
> papers.  She is now running Fedora 6.  (The conversion from Windows to
> Fedora happened after graduation.)  She asked me what software she
> should use for writing her Math papers, and being an old ascii text guy,
> I did not know what to tell her.  
> 
> Looking through the available packages I saw
>         TeXmacs
>         openoffice.org-math
> among others.  
> 
> Then I realized someone on this list would have useful advice.
> 
> Thanks.
> 

What kind of math papers are we talking about?  If this is just for a
course or two, it's probably not worth the effort involved in learning
anything specialized, so the equation editor in a word processor would
do the trick.  I wrote my senior thesis in college using a word
processor, but that's only because I didn't know any better.

For a degree in math, or for research that she's hoping to publish, or
for longer papers, LaTeX is the best choice; there is a lot to learn,
but there are a bunch of good books to help, and the extra power offered
by LaTeX is... well, kind of like the extra power offered by a
fully-loaded Linux installation over a bare-bones Windows 1.0
installation.  FWIW, there are more mathematical journals that will take
LaTeX files than there are journals that will take Word files.  My grad
school thesis was written in LaTeX, and the process was much more
straightforward, despite being a book instead of a paper and more
complicated material than the undergraduate thesis was.



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