Now the power is at your fingertips.

I've been writing my work term report over the past week (gosh, Matt, doing work well before it's due! It's unheard of!) and I've discovered a very handy new tool when it comes to writing technical reports and stuff. It's called LaTeX, and it's amazing. Never again will you have to fiddle around with Word to make a document look exactly the way you want it to, especially if you have a template already made.

Basically, what it boils down to is an HTML-esque language (though I use that reference very loosely) to format a document just the way you want. Say you want to insert a picture in your document, put a caption under it, and label it so that not only when you refer to it somewhere else in the document, the name would be consistent (say, Figure 3 if it's the third image in the document), but if that name were to change for any reason, all of the references would update themselves so you don't have to search through the entire document to make sure you get everything. Everything formats properly as well - you don't have to keep readjusting your picture everytime you have to change the text around it. Do you want your document to auto-generate a table of contents? You can do that if you have a template for it or you're willing to code it yourself. I personally have the former, which makes it super-easy. Do you want to write fancy math equations like they do in the books and on tests and stuff? Done! (Sure, Word does this too, but this is more fun :P)

The best part about it is that when you're done, it can look really professional and very clean. I thought it was pretty cool to use, though there's a bit of a learning curve. It's great for reports and stuff, but authors also use it for books (fiction or not) so the publisher can do all the fancy typesetting stuff for them. It's so cool.

Um, and yeah. I'm coming home tomorrow night and I'll be back for the week until classes start again on May 5th. Hope to see some of you soon!

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