Saturday, November 01, 2008

latex

What's hilarious about the word latex is when you google it, you are directed to a multitude of pages about the programming language that it is. It's basically the unix of word processors. However, the sponsored ads on the other hand, include such gems as a luxury love swing, latex body paint and latex underwear. Ah, the internet, informative and filthy at the exact same time.

I have recently been trying to get to grips with latex, which is one of those things where if you are just trying to write a simple document, word will probably be easier, but if you want to do something a bit more complex, latex is your guy. Not only does it handle mathematical formulae much, much, better than word, it's also the program of choice for practically every single mathematician ever anywhere, so it's obviously a good thing to learn. It is, however, a fickle mistress, and the program I have to run it, texnic centre, delights in being extremely obscure in it's error declarations. It's error code will often claim it had to do certain things, like add missing brackets, which can prove utterly baffling, until you realise that messing up with one error can cause a whole host of unrelated errors, and those are the ones that get reported. This can be.... frustrating.

Still, I now have a two page report of what I have done over october (obviously a very shortened version!) and a page of questions for gsk, so they can explain their slightly confusing data for me. I'm feeling fairly positive about the phd at the moment, a feeling I'm sure will pass....

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1 Comments:

At 5:52 pm, Anonymous Anonymous said...

you do get some rather err interesting results if you look for latex textbooks on amazon... made what i was looking for feel even more tragic and geeky
nix

 

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