I'm one of those philosopher/logician types and we use a lot of strange symbols. I've been looking at Latex and it seems like the kind of thing that I should learn--in fact, I should have learned it a long time ago.

Anyway, it looks like it can all be written in any old text editor (so I'm okay there), but what do I do after that? I looked through the packages in Synaptic but there were many. After writing up the document do I pass it through an interpreter or is there an app that can interpret commands on the fly (maybe like an html editor which can put preview in a different tab--this would be great)?

Anyone want to throw me a bone? Sorry for the noob question.

Hi!

Am glad you are picking up LaTeX. Am doing it myself. One of the good free documentation is The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX 2e.

On Chapter 1 page 8
the commands states This will generate a .dvi file. You can view the dvi file using xdvi OR you can export it to pdf using This is assuming you have TeTeX system install on your Slackware or Debian. The default which came with Slackware 10 works great.

Reminder again. Go get some documentation from LaTeX website.

Cool. Thanks for the quick reply, I'll do some more reading and make sure I have that tetex thing.

Gotta sober up some first...

There is a web site that you may want to visit: www.ctan.org.

Also, here is a link to the pdf file of the 'Not so short...' publication mentioned in the last post.
http://www.ctan.org/ctan/tex-archive...ction=/search/

If you also use windows, such as at work, this site can be used to download the 'miktex' system.

Also, there is a KDE program called KILE which stands for 'KDE Interactive Latex Environment'. A similar program for windows is 'WinEdt'.

Check out LyX. It is a nice GUI front-end for LaTeX. It runs under linux, MacOSX, and Windows.

Thanks for the tips. That LyX is pretty great from what I have seen so far--it displays math and other formatting features really well and still allows for the insertion of LaTeX code, so that is good mix of WYSIWYG and WYSIWYM features.

Off to practice, thanks again.

Besides LyX, I also use Kile, an editor-based LaTeX integration environment.