: Re: Using LaTex medium to enhance writing I asked my Calculus Professor for a recommendation. He said, "Sure. No problem. But write me an essay about yourself and since you're a computer guy,

LaTeX is a fantastic piece of software. I do all my text writing in it - papers, letters, etc.

People are known to get totally addicted to it. Wander over to tex.stackexchange.com, and you'll find lots of such people there.

There is some overhead involved in learning it. However, this overhead is mostly caused by things like graphics and mathematics. A personal essay should not have any of these unless you are a graphics artist or a mathematical researcher. And if you were the latter you would already know LaTeX. :-) For a personal essay, the minimal level of markup required is trivial; just the beginning and end bits, which look as follows:

documentclass{article}
begin{document}

title{my title}
maketitle

some stuff

end{document}

See? Nothing to it. Put this in a text file called something.tex, and then do pdflatex something.tex and you get a something.pdf. Of course you need a LaTeX distribution installed, but if you are using a sensible OS like any of the Linux-based OS's, that is a piece of cake.

I think your professor may be having a little joke, or maybe he just wanted to see if you would show some initiative. Regardless, I recommend you follow his suggestion, and turn in a LaTeX file. Even if it is a bit rough, he should be impressed. Make sure to mention you've never used LaTeX before.

The people at tex.sx are very friendly. If you need help, go and talk to them. Chat is a good way. If you have questions, make sure to check the site first to make sure it has not already been answered.

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: Re: Using LaTex medium to enhance writing I asked my Calculus Professor for a recommendation. He said, "Sure. No problem. But write me an essay about yourself and since you're a computer guy,

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: How long on average does a major house 'consider' a book before rejecting or accepting it My first two fiction books are with a top publishing house. They have had them for three months. Six

: I use the Gollum wiki. It works well for me. There's no database, just wiki-formatted text files. It uses the git version control system so you have a history of every change you make (and

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