My LaTeX Page

Why Bother

What is LaTeX ? It is a markup language-meaning that What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) does not hold. For Instance, in MS Word you type text and format text (e.g. make bold, make headers) at the same time, so it is WYSIWYG. On the other hand, in LaTeX you just type plain text without any formatting. Formating is separate from content -- this is the main difference. Formatting of text is done with annotations or markup system. It is a good idea. WYSIWYG is a bad idea.

Instead of repeating reasons for using LaTeX reiterated elsewhere (e.g. here) I will be innovative and say here why LaTeX works for me:

It is fun! At the beginning, you will spend hours figuring out how to typeset a page of text that you could write in MS Word in five minutes, but you will like it.
LaTeX gives quality. Document is clean and easy to read, but also the whole process of writing is cleaner and more logical -- you focus on writing, not on formatting.
LaTeX is convenient: it formats everything for you, takes care of hyperlinks, figure numbering etc. Why would you waste time on that ?
LaTeX is easy; well after couple of months... But then if you do not give up -- you will be more efficient than with WYSIWYG. It is an investment -- spend some time now on it to save time in the future.

Tips

I am not going to explain here how to use LaTeX--use Google. There is plenty of information online. Again, I will just say what worked for me:

LaTeX comes in so called distributions -- get an easy one. If you are unfortunate and use MS Windows then get proTeXt.
Do not try to start with Emacs and AucTeX unless you want to produce your first LaTeX document in 3 months. Of course, after 3 months switch to Emacs !
Learn by example ! Google "latex example" and visit 10 top hits (can be 11-20 if you like) then copy and paste latex input (tex) file, compile (e.g. run pdftex) it, change it, compile it etc.
If you do not understand something-google it.
Compile often -- if you write 10 pages of text and compile it only after writing 10 pages you will get 179 errors or so.
Try Beamer ! (google it)
If you use Stata-check out ats ucla.
Once you use LaTeX, maybe it is time to stop using MS Windows and switch to Linux (Why would you overpay for Mac?) Start with Ubuntu, then try Gentoo.

Resources

Pages that are useful:

LaTeX examples on the Web: http://www.maths.manchester.ac.uk/~kd/latextut/pdfbyex.htm
HOWTO setup various text editors under MS Windows for LaTeX http://physics.syr.edu/~salgado/software/latex/miktex_setup/
The best text editor for MS Windows is Notepad++ See above link -how to set it up with Miktex, but Notepad++ can also run Stata ! http://code.google.com/p/notepad-stats-integration/
Online equation editorhttp://www.codecogs.com/latex/eqneditor.php
Very good reference at Cambridge http://www-h.eng.cam.ac.uk/help/tpl/textprocessing/latex_maths+pix/node16.html
Good reference at Harvard http://www.math.harvard.edu/texman/

My Stuff

If you write a dissertation at UTD you may want to use my utd_dissertation.sty To extract it you need something like TUGZip (If you use MS Windows, if not -- you know what to do).
Current Version is utd_dissertation2_1.tbz