I'm not dead!
I haven't update my blog for a month becasue I really have no time. I had to study from 8:40 to 17:20 every day due to the great flood. Agh! I hate school time.
I just finished my final exams yesterday. I feel really great now, just like getting out of the jail.
Let's come back to the story about Latex.
I had to write a software architecture document as an assignment. My teacher provided me a Microsoft Word template but it looks suck. Therefore, I decided to write from scratch with LaTeX.
I had to install MacTeX for Lion. Its size was pretty large in my opinion but that was fine. I downloaded TeXShop 3.04 for Lion to use as a LaTeX editor.
To me, writing a report with LaTeX is like writing a HTML page. I just specify chapters and sections that I am going to have and provide their content. LaTeX will take care of the output for you and it is just beautiful. I see the semantics in my source file.
LaTeX is easy until you want to customize something.
To customize something, I found that I had to use extra packages and had to read its document which was not quite productive at the beginning.
Things became more complicated when I had to deal wtih table layout. I would say that it was very challeging. I took a lot of time to figure out how to get the table layout I want. However, I felt like I was using table the wrong way so that it was complicated.
To be honest, I'm still not be able to remember all the essential commands in LaTeX. I just open the documentation when I need.
Anyway, It was fun and I will continue using it for sure.