LaTeX – the word processor for engineers (and smart people too)
When i met Nuno Job, we had a great time talking about technology and its future. He told me about LaTeX, a logical structure word processor. It allows people to write documents, books, reports, articles, you name it, through proper source code. This means a lot of things to me:
- The code stays organized, which means the result document stays organized.
- No templates; or in other words, one single template.
- Want to pass the document through the network? Just a few KB instead of almost 1MB…!
Despite the LaTeX distribution being larger than a CD (at least for Mac OS, the Windows version is slightly smaller), it’s worth it, especially if you’re in a team in which everyone has to write a piece of a written delivery. I remember I had to spend almost two hours to format every piece into one big furball. Sounds kind of messy, huh? Try gathering up a team, each one writes a piece of the document at their own way and then try using LaTeX. Your conclusions should be the same as mine. 