Rhys Hardwick wrote:
Hey there everyone. I was wondering if anyone knew of a good open-source program for writing Theses, Dissertations, Journal articles, etc. Open office, AbiWord etc are all good word processors, but there must be a program that is specifically for the porpus of writing these types of things. If anyone knows of anything like this, that would be fantastic! Rhys
What you want is LaTeX. However, it is not a word processor in the traditional sense of the word. It is a typesetting system (LaTeX is actually a macro package that sits over the TeX typesetting system). It would more like HTML, in the sense that writing LaTeX is similar to writing markup. There are literally thousands of options that you can mess with for your particular document. The nice thing is that most schools and academic organizations provide style sheets that allow you to drop them into your source directory and immediately have your document recompiled to match their style specifications. There are some excellent sources on the internet that provide everything from tutorial to advanced feature help. If you have never used it, the book "LaTeX: A Document Preparation System" by Leslie Lamport is a good introduction. Leslie Lamport is the original developer of LaTeX and I think is still heavily involved with it. Just Google search for "latex" (I know it feels weird to enter that in Google, but every hit on the first page is related to LaTeX). Also, if you are a KDE user, the kile package provides an excellent environment (or so I have heard). If you are a fan of vim, then try vim-latexsuite. If you are emacs fan, then you want auctex. -Roberto -- Roberto C. Sanchez http://familiasanchez.net/~sanchezr
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