| Date: | Tue, 5 Feb 2008 |
| From: | Denis Chebikin |
| Subject: | SPAMS is back! Thursday 5pm in 4-231 |
Hi all,
The long and strenuous winter break is over, and SPAMS resumes this
Thursday with a talk by Alexey on a very useful topic to all of us. There
will be dinner in 2-349 afterwards.
See you there!
Denis
Rehab for LaTeX sufferers
Did you ever, at dawn, with eyes bloodshot from a night of doing LaTeX,
promise yourself to quit the habit? Did you ever, frustrated by an
untraceable error, curse and beat your computer, and then, full of shame,
beg its broken case for forgiveness? If so, you may wish to consult with
MIT Medical Mental Health --- this seminar will probably not help you.
For those of you in earlier stages of a LaTeX addiction, I will give a
brief tour of LyX. It's a program designed to make producing LaTeX
documents more intuitive, quick, and practically error-free. Instead of
typing backslashes and arcane commands in a text editor, you use a
graphical "what you see is what you mean" environment. You don't have to
worry about closing curly braces. Your formulas don't take up half a page
of jumbled text -- they appear as printed. However, you don't sacrifice
flexibility; you can still insert straight LaTeX whenever you need it.
LyX isn't perfect, and it doesn't read your mind. So, I will cover a few
common tricks and workarounds that would otherwise take a while to
discover.