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Latex for University Papers | April 08, 2003

Long time no blog. I've been keeping busy with university work. Lately, I've become pretty fed up using MS Word for putting together longer documents (i.e. papers), so I decided to try something different: LaTeX. This turned out to work surprisingly well - even in German. Seriously, they should have mandatory courses for this at uni. No more hassles with footnotes, TOCs and bibliographies - this is all taken care of automagically. Seeing your final document beautifully set and rendered as a PDF is awesome. I'm never going back.
For anyone who's bound to the Windows platform, I suggest you download and install MiKTeX first. The base install provides you with most common packages. You can always download modules for enhanced functionality later. Then get yourself a copy of WinEdt. This should provide you with a nice environment for your writing. If you happen to be writing in German, I also suggest you check out jurabib, a set of bibliography templates for students of law and the humanities.
Most of the work I've done with LaTeX so far has been on German linguistics. Feel free to use my current LaTeX preamble if you like.
You may also want to consider getting a book on LaTeX. The one I have is LaTeX Line by Line by Diller. It's pretty good, although not quite as detailed as some of the others available. It covers most things you will need though and is easy to follow for beginners. I found these two PDFs (here and here) to be very useful as well. More useful stuff is listed here and here.
LaTeX seems to be in wide use for mathematics. If this is your area of interest, I guess you will have heard of it already. Unfortunately, in the humanities it's a different story.

Update: OreillyNet has just posted this article which is really good - especially for Mac users.

Posted at 01:42 PM CET