μblog: engineering from the trenches

People often complain that their Microsoft Word crashes often and is full of bugs, so I present LaTeX (pronounced lay-tech). The origins can be traced back to Donald Knuth, who was dissatisfied with the available computer aided typesetting features of the 1970s decided to come up with his own markup language, enter TeX. By the 1980s, Leslie Lamport further refined the language adding a La prefix and bringing forth the manifestation that we have today. The key aspect of LaTeX is the ability to separate information about rendering, the markup, from the actual document content. Since you are editing a source file of sorts, it is straightforward to change the output rendering to create the final document in DVI or PS or PDF. Finally, LaTeX is very old in the computer sense and as a consequence is very mature in terms of bugs and extremely portable. Here is a story from OSNews that pretty much sums up the same points in greater detail. Here is a comparison of Word and LaTeX formatting of the same article. Lastly, there is this TeX users group that was recommended by my office mate with a decent set of tutorials.

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