LaTeX
I use Don Knuth's TeX computer typesetting system for almost all of my academic writing. In particular, I use the LaTeX extensions by Leslie Lamport and occasionally the AMS-LaTeX extensions by the American Mathematical Society. LaTeX is appealing to me because it allows easy inclusion of mathematical formulae (especially compared to the horrible hunt-and-click interface of the Equation Editor in Microsoft Office) and automatic generation of tables of contents, bibliographies, and indexes. Here are some programs that I have found useful for writing in LaTeX:
Online resources
- The TeX Catalogue: A useful guide to the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network (CTAN),particularly for finding macros to accomplish a specific task.
- lshort (PDF): The classic online tutorial for LaTeX.
LaTeX systems
- MiKTeX: A full-featured implementation of Don Knuth's TeX typesetting system for Microsoft Windows operating systems. Has a really nice package manager which can be configured to download LaTeX packages on the fly.
- MacTeX: A Mac OS X disk image containing a complete TeX system, including i-Installer, TeXShop, and more. MacTeX 2008 is based on TeXLive 2008, which now contains a package manager called the TeX Live Manager (
tlmgr), so it should be considered the preferred (La)TeX distribution for Mac OS X.
LaTeX editors
- Eclipse: A Java-based integrated development environment (IDE) with built-in CVS support. With the TeXlipse plugin, Eclipse becomes a great TeX editor, too.
- TeXShop: A nice TeX editor for Mac OS X
LaTeX document classes
- Beamer: A document class for creating beautiful presentations.
- powerdot: Another nice document class for creating presentations.
- moderncv (TeX Catalogue entry)
- hmcpset: A document class for homework assignments provided by the Harvey Mudd College Mathematics Department.
- exam (TeX Catalogue entry)
- University of Michigan thesis templates
- rac.sty: thesis template from Tim Schwider (Ph.D., Mathematics, 2001)
- umich-thesis: thesis template from Bil Kleb (Ph.D., Aerospace Engineering, 2004)
- umthesis: thesis template from Rob Felty (Ph.D., Linguistics, 2007)
LaTeX packages
- url: Enables proper line-breaking of URLs
- geometry: Enables easy configuration of margins
- AMS-LaTeX
- listings: Pretty-printing of source code listings
- mhchem: Easy typesetting of simple chemical formulas
- siunitx: Typeset SI (or custom) units
BibTeX tools
- Bibdesk: A Mac OS X frontend for BibTeX.
- JabRef: A Java-based graphical frontend for managing BibTeX bibliographic databases.
- IEEE journal abbreviation file for JabRef
- OSA journal abbreviation file for JabRef
- Pybliographer: A Python-based frontend for BibTeX.
- cb2Bib: A cross-platform tool for rapidly extracting unformatted or unstandardized bibliographic references from email alerts, web pages, and PDF files.
Graphics
- PGF/TikZ (TeX Catalogue entry)
- TpX: For those who prefer to manually draw figures rather than create them programmatically, this is a lightweight graphics editor for Windows.
- Metapost: A system for generating Postscript figures written by John Hobby. Metapost is a set of extensions for METAFONT, the font renderer for TeX.
- PyX: A Python module which enables the generation of EPS figures.
- Asymptote
- Ipe: a drawing editor for creating figures in PDF or (encapsulated) Postscript format
- Graphics Layout Engine (GLE): A simple yet powerful system for generating Encapsulated Postscript (EPS) figures for inclusion in LaTeX documents.