Tuesday, February 07, 2006

The Joy of LaTeX

Ok, I'm a geek. Over the past 10 years or so, I've worked on a handful of math and engineering problems that I thought were interesting. Yes, most of them were "spare-time" activities, although a few were inspired by work stuff. I recently made a list of all of them, and I suddenly had the urge to publish them. Maybe some other people will find these things interesting as well.

At any rate, I wanted a way to publish them with all the math equations, as well as generate PDF's and HTML. I had heard about LaTeX for a long time, but now I had a fine excuse to give it a try.

I first tried the TeXLive distribution, but I never could get it to work on Windows. (Maybe this has been fixed since then) Then I tried MikTeX. It was a fairly straightforward installation. After working out a few examples, I was hooked. My first draft of a test article turned out pretty well:

http://www.avoidspikes.com/textest/gamma.html

I use pdflatex to generate pdfs and htlatex (part of tex4ht) to create html + pngs.

At any rate, it's nice to see that free software can be used to do professional typesetting. I'm planning to use this stuff to document my math problems, as well as some theory behind discrete sound filtering in MAME.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

LaTeX is the best! I wrote my entire PhD thesis in it, and I don't know how I woul have done without it. It's second to none when it comes to things like figures, equations, and references. And the learning curve isn't very steep.

Anonymous said...

I also wrote my entire PhD thesis using LaTeX (MiKTeX distribution).

It's the best option for equations composition.

I suggest you to use LaTeX, DVIPS y PS2PDF to produce PDF files. The bad thing is than you must use EPS files instead of PNG, JPG or TIFF, but the quality will improve a lot, and you can use PS Printers to generate high quality EPS files.

Good luck!!

(Excuse my bad English expressions)

Wolverine said...

Hi,
If you want to use easily LaTeX on your blog, I have developped something like a compiler for blogger: http://servalx02.blogspot.com/2007/01/latex-on-blogger.html
let me know if you find that useful ;-) for me it is ;-)
Now Blogger is becoming more math friendly ;-)

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