Posts Tagged ‘science’
LaTeX, TeXnicCenter and LyX
Some time ago I sat down to learn how to write equations on Wikipedia using TeX, a language used by scientists and mathematicians for technical documents. MediaWiki, the software behind Wikipedia, uses a subset of this language so that we can have pretty equations on our articles, like this one I just did (right). For some time I was wondering what was used to produce the beautiful equations in textbooks and so I delved further and discovered LaTeX, the language used. It is called a typesetting language – you type out your document with tags (it’s a markup language, not a programming one), run it through the TeX engine and get a beautiful image or PDF out of the other side. It does headings with a table of contents, margin and foot notes, cross references that work regardless of which page the actual content is, tables (with difficulty) and of course beautiful equations like the one above.
Writing LaTeX in a normal text editor works, but it is better to find an app that will check your syntax, highlight brackets and the like, and then compile into a finished document at the press of a button – effectively an IDE. So I started using TeXnicCenter on Windows which is rather nice. I would recommend it for beginners. I would suggest that readers make use of Google primarily for learning the language – there are tutorials dotted around. I intend to write my coursework up this way after Christmas – it makes it look very professional when done right. Then I will get gnuplot (not actually GNU, by the way) up to draw graphs, but I am not sure this is allowed.
Yesterday I found myself on Ubuntu and wanted to write up some revision notes for physics so I fired up the package manager and installed a selection of LaTeX GUIs, and through this discovered LyX, a rather nice one. It is actually a complete environment where you are not required to use any code at all, although a knowledge of how the language works helps. Through this I produced a rather pretty overview of the course so far that I intend to use just before the exam for last-minute revision and something I can add to and complement over the revision period. Also for me doing revision this way is more fun because I do love the beautiful typesetting. So, if you like maths or mathful science, learn LaTeX or get a copy of LyX.