LaTeX

These few days my life has been revolving around LaTeX (pronounced lah-tech or lay-tech; I prefer the former). For those who has completely no idea of what that is (which I suspect is the majority), it is a publishing programme best for typing documents with a hell lot of equations. Which means, as a physics major, I'm bound to use it.

It's a brilliant programme in a way that, after selecting what kind of structure the document should have (such as "report" or "article"), I don't have to worry about its formatting. It will take care of labelling of equation or assigning of bibliography, and lots of stuff like that. And it allows the typing of almost all sorts of equations and symbols.

It didn't take me long to learn how to start off with the simple commands of the programme, but it certainly took much more time to getting used to. But now that I'm more or less accustomed to it, I must admit it's better in typing documents with lots of equations than other word processors such as Microsoft Word or even OpenOffice Writer.

Given that my project is on cosmological inflation and thus contains quite a handful of equations, I'm pretty glad that there is this programme to help me with the report.

This is a little snapshot of the code I've written:



And this is a small part of my unfinished report, generated in PDF format:



However, I predict that this report will claim a major hold on my time until before the exams.

On an off-topic note, if you have not heard the Hokkien speeding song that's spreading faster than the bird flu (a bit of a wrong analogy here, ain't it?), please do yourself a favour and grab it here.