Linked by Christian Paratschek on Fri 10th Sep 2004 05:18 UTC
Before I start, let me tell you the little story, how I got the idea for writing this article. When I wrote my first article for OSNews, one of the screenshots I included showed my diploma thesis. I merely wanted to show that OpenOffice.org in Fedora Core 2 features native icons, nothing more.
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This might be long ... (brain dump)
If you are going to write long documents with lots of sections, references, cross references, figures, tables, Table of contents, equations etc... then LaTeX is by far the best solution.
I must say that I use OOo a fair bit too, but would never recommmend someone write a thesis or a book with it. The "sytlist" is a really nice feature though. OOo is actually a lot more powerful than people realise at first, and it often has an elgant way of doing things ... but it is not always obvious at first.
Anyway, the reason I like LaTeX so much for "long" documents is that it does everything automatically for you (references, numbering the chapters and sections, subsections, writing equations is simple (when you are used to it) and it will number them automatically as well keeping them in the right order!, cross references, table of contents etc...)
I would always encourage people to write LaTeX manually, since you will always be in control and understand how it all works. It does take a little time to get use to, however there is also a lot of help on the net. The time you spend learing it will pay itself back at least x10 when trying to "fix" MS word or OOo writer. As a side effect I now write HTML by hand as well, and wonder why I never started before! (It is really a lot of fun... or am I becoming a geek. :O)
I recommend Jedit. The more I used Jedit with LaTex the more I liked it. (Don't be deceived by its simple looks. It is highly configurable, and has lots of very useful plugins.)
For those how want a quick intro to latex this is what a simple book would look like.
documentclass[a4paper, 12pt]{book}
begin{document}
title{Short intro to LaTeX}
author{Well ... me!}
maketitle % This will automatically create the front page.
chapter{Introduction}
This is a short introduction to LaTex
% This is a comment and will not be parsed.
chapter{Main content}
label{Chap.One}
This is going to be long so better break it up into sections
section{This is the first section}
blablabla
section{This is the second section}
Here is an axample of referencing something. As we saw at the begining of Chapter~ref{Chap.One}. Ok this would be pointless for chapter one but if you had many chapters and decide to "rearrange" the order of your chapters or even sections, LaTeX will be able to track everything and reference everything properly.
chapter{Conclusion}
Better conclude now...
end{document}
better stop here before it gets too long;) ...