LaTeX - worth it for report writing?

[duragezic]

Yesterday I was reading a document for one of my class's lab sessions and it recommended using LaTeX for the reports and in fact said the document itself was written using it. It looked quite good and neat, and it said that it would be a good skill to have as an engineer. Furthermore, I have a 'Professional Development' class this semester that focuses on technical/IEEE writing.

I checked into it, but it seems like it would be very time consuming. Yet it can produce very good papers/reports. Even with all of the Word/word processor experience I have, I can't seem to make a lab report or otherwise look very professional.

But one thing I noticed is that one of the best things about LaTeX is for math and equations. Though computers and EE generally involve equations, I at most have a few per report and those are simple and easily done with Equation Editor. But the overall format of documents seem to look excellent when using LaTeX.

1) Is it worth the learning curve to use it even if the reports are not heavily math-based?

2) What the hell package do I get? I couldn't figure out what everything meant. The proText package was like a whole cd ISO. Can I use a text editor (I use JEdit) and not need a whole package? The further I digged it got needlessly complicated... reminded me of obscure linux crap. Not sure what packages are outdated and what it all comes with or is required to make the documents.

3) If not LaTeX, would I be better off for writing lab reports by upgrading to Office 2003? I really like Office 2000 since it's small, fast, no annoying helpers and 'Common Task' sidebars, etc. I can get Office 2003 for free from Academic Alliance, but as said haven't made the jump yet since when I use it at school it annoys me and I don't see what it offers over 2000 (could be very wrong here).

Seen a lot of LaTeX fanatics and other the complete opposite who say its obsolete and a waste of time. Opinions? (specifically from engineering students but anyone too)

 

[CSMR]

Latex is not designed to be user-friendly. It is a limited programming language for typesetting. If you are a fanatic you can code your own documents. But even working out what to download and install to get it to work is not an easy task.

There is nothing WYSIWYG to Latex as far as I know. The closest you get is Scientific Workplace, which is easy to use but time-consuming to write mathematics in. Relatively easy to use that is most of the time. This is what I use.

I would say don't use Latex if you don't need much mathematics and your work does not need to be in that form for publication. Yes it's pretty but you will have to sacrifice time that could be spent on real work.

I hate writing in Latex but I have to use it because it is the only choice in my field.

But I heard recently that Mathematica can output to Latex so I may try that out. It has a nice interface for putting in formulas certainly.

 

[you2]

I like latex - been using it for a while. After you write your first couple of documents it becomes much easier as you can use them for template. The section/chapter abilities as well as bib and appendix are quite strong (compared to office).

 

[duragezic]

Yeah what you said CSMR pretty much sums up what I got out of reading about it in archived threads. Then again things that you2 and others I've read make me kind of want to try it. Perhaps I will if I ever get time. But as you said, just getting the right software is a PITA.

Or I maybe should finally jump to Office 2003 since it would be a free download and learn what tools it has to offer for technical report writing. I suppose Office 2007 would be best, and hopefully that will appear soon on Academic Alliance!

Any other opinions on LaTeX? And what is a simple package that could at least get my started? Say if I had 2 hours to spare, would I be able to set everything up, read a quick intro/tutorial, and do a sample page or two?

 

[CP5670]

I use a package called Miktex. I don't know if it's any better or worse than others, but it does the job. The core functionality of all of them should be similar, anyway.

Latex does make nice documents, but it takes forever to do anything with it if you have a lot of formulas and symbols in your paper. I tried to transcribe a math paper I wrote into the Latex format but gave up after a while, when I realized that it would take at least a week of hard work. I use the Mathematica frontend instead, which has bugs and occasionally makes a mess in documents but in which you can write the stuff about ten times as fast.

But I heard recently that Mathematica can output to Latex so I may try that out. It has a nice interface for putting in formulas certainly.

That's what I do. The converter works pretty well for the most part.

 

[you2]

Hum. Not sure why you had so much trouble with math formulae. I found it quite simple - you can do simple things like $x_2$ and $\frac{n_3}{\sum{x_2}{x_3}}$

Can't help you with packages - i've never used latex on windows....