March 21, 2004
Looking good in LaTeX
We have this group project we have to complete in Calc class. We must come up with a proposal which documents the design of a fictional water slide. Seeing as there was a lot of math involved, i started searching the web for software that could help me produce good looking equations rather than fumbling through superscripts and lined in Word. I stumbled upon a bit of software (unfortunately) named LaTeX. (Actually i guess it's supposed to be pronounced like "lay-tech".) Anyway it's a powerful type setting tool that can whip out great looking mathematical equations like this:
In order to produce that output, i had to enter: "T_{ride}=\int_{0}^{1}\frac{1000\sqrt{1+f'(y)^2}}{140\sqrt{y}}dy". In order to enter my commands and view the resulting PDF document, i'm using a program called TeXShop for OSX. It's a GUI front end for the command line LaTeX utilities.
So far it looks promising. They have every symbol imaginable and the syntax looks easy enough to follow. Plus they have great features for automatic section numbering and easy tools to reference other parts of the document that will update as things are moved. I'm sure this will help guarantee my group gets an A.
Posted by Matthew at March 21, 2004 05:20 PM