Geek help!
There has got be be someone on my friends list who can help me with this....(I'm looking at you for starters eggwhite)
I work closely with some bioinformaticians/statisticians, including writing papers together. This is somewhat hampered by the fact that they, being geeks*, like to use Unix and hence some of the documents get written using LaTeX. This is fine if I'm giving them stuff to put in, but makes it more tricky to get stuff back to edit, and then return. I have a small amount of experience using Unix, but frankly, I'm getting too old to learn an entirely new operating system for no reason other than sheer bloody mindedness**
Anyway my question is: does anyone know if there is some kind of nice friendly piece of software that I can download onto my PC that will allow me to work with LaTeX files? I'm happy to do some command line stuff but I need to be able to open files and add text in without having to spend a year reading the manual. I found a reference on the web to "Scientific Word on Windows" which sound like what I need but I can't quite figure out if this is something I can use, or if it's Mac*** specific or what:
"Scientific Word on Windows is a front end to LaTeX. It behaves like a word processor on screen and encodes your intentions in a LaTeX file and so hides the worst of the complications of LaTeX. However, you will need to enter some LaTeX commands yourself which means knowing what to do."
I realise this is probably like getting Word to do your html for you but at least it would be a start.
Any ideas, peeps????
(NB I'm asking this on LJ rather than asking the aforementioned statisticians because as ever there is Politics....)
*this is not a criticism
** yes yes I know Linux is the operating system of the gods, and it's not big or clever or cool but I'm happy using Windows, I'm just a biologist, you know? and after 15 years I know how to get round most of its quirks and Bill Gates gives all his money to charity these days anyway
*** Don't even get me started on Macs, I'm sure they were jolly good in 1987. I love my iPod.
I work closely with some bioinformaticians/statisticians, including writing papers together. This is somewhat hampered by the fact that they, being geeks*, like to use Unix and hence some of the documents get written using LaTeX. This is fine if I'm giving them stuff to put in, but makes it more tricky to get stuff back to edit, and then return. I have a small amount of experience using Unix, but frankly, I'm getting too old to learn an entirely new operating system for no reason other than sheer bloody mindedness**
Anyway my question is: does anyone know if there is some kind of nice friendly piece of software that I can download onto my PC that will allow me to work with LaTeX files? I'm happy to do some command line stuff but I need to be able to open files and add text in without having to spend a year reading the manual. I found a reference on the web to "Scientific Word on Windows" which sound like what I need but I can't quite figure out if this is something I can use, or if it's Mac*** specific or what:
"Scientific Word on Windows is a front end to LaTeX. It behaves like a word processor on screen and encodes your intentions in a LaTeX file and so hides the worst of the complications of LaTeX. However, you will need to enter some LaTeX commands yourself which means knowing what to do."
I realise this is probably like getting Word to do your html for you but at least it would be a start.
Any ideas, peeps????
(NB I'm asking this on LJ rather than asking the aforementioned statisticians because as ever there is Politics....)
*this is not a criticism
** yes yes I know Linux is the operating system of the gods, and it's not big or clever or cool but I'm happy using Windows, I'm just a biologist, you know? and after 15 years I know how to get round most of its quirks and Bill Gates gives all his money to charity these days anyway
*** Don't even get me started on Macs, I'm sure they were jolly good in 1987. I love my iPod.