Re: [asa] writing equations - a request

George,

By head and shoulders the best system for writing and typesetting equations
is LaTeX, which is used all throughout academia. I'm intimately familiar
with it having used it for my PhD thesis.

The best known PC implementation of LaTeX is Miktex, which can be found at

http://www.miktex.org/

There is a huge amount of stuff on the web about it, and with a little
Google searching you should be able to get a tutorial. It's a script based
system - you supply the script in a simple markup language, and then the
LaTeX processor translates it into a viewable file that you can convert
easily to PDF, for example.

Though it isn't WYSIWYG, the equations are typeset really beautifully.
Equations produced by the Microsoft Word equation letter look absolutely
horrible by comparison, and also I find the MS Word equation editor
cumbersome to use, forcing you to use the point-and-click method with the
mouse. In LaTeX, once you've got the hang of the markup language, you just
type it straight in!

Integrals and summations with limits are dead easy in Latex; eg:

\sum_{i=1}^{24} i^2 = 70^2

The \sum gives your sigma, and the bracketed expressions give the limits in
exactly the right place.

I forgot to mention. LaTeX and Miktex are completely free. You just
download them and off you go.

Hope this helps.

Iain

On 7/19/06, George Murphy <gmurphy@raex.com> wrote:
>
> Soon I'm going to be getting off the asa list for awhile - not as a
> matter of taking my dolly dishes & going home or anything of that sort but
> just that I'm going to be in & out & need to focus on some other work. &
> 1 part of that other work leads me to a request.
>
> I haven't been much involved in writing technical papers in physics for
> awhile & to the extent that I've had to write equations on a PC have
> managed to do it in a rather makeshift way. But I'd like to know what sort
> of software is available for such work - i.e., writing relatively
> complicated equations. By this I mean not just long collections of symbols
> but things that can't be done conveniently with what's available in Word or
> WordPerfect. I have in mind things like large integral or summation signs
> with limits, complicated expressions under radical signs, tensors with both
> sub- & superscripts &c. WordPerfect has an "equation editor" with which
> those things seems doable in principle but trying to use it seems to me to
> be a rather tedious process. (It doesn't help that I have a bit of a
> luddite streak - I was probably 1 of the last physicists in the USA to put
> my slide rule away.)
>
> Any suggestions?
>
> For clarity - I'm not talking about computer programs for *solving*equations, just for writing them on a PC.
>
> Shalom
> George
> http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/ <http://web.raex.com/%7Egmurphy/>
>

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