I'm not normally one for these short entries, but . . .

[philena]

Dude! I'm using LaTeX! I'm writing my syntax homework on it! I've got three pages! It has a title, and an abstract, which I managed to re-label "homework summary", and I have a table of contents and section labels and numbered examples with glosses, and I even have funny letters! Like å and ø! And when I run it so far, I don't have any errors! (er, that is, I've run it and corrected the errors it points me to until I can run it without errors. I don't get it right from the beginning.) This is so cool! It looks all professional-like! My goal now is to be able to use it until it doesn't take me two hours to recapitulate the assignment and type in the examples that were given on the assignment sheet. See, if I had been doing this in Word, I would be discussing the content by now instead of futzing with the formatting. Apparently, though, once you get used to LaTeX, it makes formatting easier. Hah. I'll believe it when I see it.

Oh! Did I mention that I replaced the keyboard in my laptop? As in, took a screwdriver to it and took out the bad one and put in a new one? Huh? Huh? Oh. I see I did in my last entry. Well, that's more evidence as to the tech guru I am. I'm just that awesome, I guess.

Comments

[philena.livejournal.com]

The procedure of using LaTeX is a lot like the procedure of learning any new program, I'm finding. For example, when you first start using Word, every time you want italics you have to go to the formatting menu and find the choice to turn on italics. Then you type what you want, and then you go to the formatting menu and turn it off. After a while you realize there's a shortcut button on one of the tool bars. Eventually you realize that you can just type Ctrl-i and get what you want. It's the same for footnotes. For a while you're going to the "insert>reference>footnote or endnote>footnote>numer it this way" menu selections, until eventually you realize you can just type ctrl-alt-f. With LaTeX for a while I'm looking at the documentation to realize that I need to type \textit{blah} every time I want italics, but eventually I get used to it.

I think what makes LaTeX so much more difficult is that you can't see if you've done anything wrong until you compile it, and then if you've accidentally typed \Textit{blah} it gives you error messages that are not always easy to interpret. With Word, since it's a whizzy-whig program, you can tell right away if you're not getting the italics, so it's easier to correct mistakes while you still know what it is that you tried to do that ended up begin wrong.