<p>I’ve learned LaTeX and found it somewhat useful, but in general it’s just been a headache for me. I could see in some fields how it would be useful, but using Word + equation editor (their new one is garbage, though) when you know the hot keys is pretty darned fast and powerful. Some of the best things I’ve learned are: Ctrl-G makes your next input a Greek letter, ctrl-F gets you a fraction, ctrl-h gets you superscript, ctrl-l gets you subscript.</p>
<p>There are a number of add-on programs for Word which will make citations pretty easy. I got Mendeley a while back, and it’s pretty nice. Cloud syncing of all your pdfs, search capabilities, automatically filling in all the citation info, and a Word plugin so you just click a button, search for the paper you want, then hit OK and it’ll cite it for you in any format (they have a huge selection of journal styles to choose from) and auto-build your citations at the end. If the auto-scanner fails to figure out all the citation info, you can just type in the DOI # and it’ll grab it from a database.</p>
<p>The problem with Mendeley’s Word plugin (which I have experimented with quite a bit), is that it’s citation formats are somewhat limited depending on your field. You can always go and learn how to create your own citation formats, but that is a small markup language of its own. It would be much nicer if the major journals would produce official citation templates for Mendeley like they do for BibTeX, but to my knowledge, none really do.</p>
<p>I use Ubuntu Linux so I can’t run MathType. However, there is a nice program called Gummi that is a LaTeX editor with a live PDF view so I can see exactly what I’m typing out in a more natural form.</p>
<p>LaTeX produces beautiful and consistent documents. It enforces separation of content and style, which is generally a very powerful concept, whether you’re writing a document or a website. Version control works well.</p>
<p>Also, Leslie Lamport (created LaTeX) and Donald Knuth (created TeX) are basically gods of CS.</p>
<p>Have any of you guys had any experience with LyX? It’s supposed to be sort of a bridge between Word and TeX, but I found it to require TeX for everything beyond extremely basic support, and wound up feeling better than neither.</p>
<p>Also, honestly, I don’t understand how anyone can say TeX saves a lot of time on homework. When I was writing up homework solutions for my students in it, I always found I’d need to work the problems on paper first, then translate everything to TeX. Are there people that can actually solve things while looking at the horrible code you generate?</p>
<p>I’ve not tried LyX but I assume it likely uses a TeX installation in the background to bridge the gap. That may be why it requires some LaTeX knowledge.</p>
<p>I definitely don’t think using LaTeX (or Word) is more efficient than doing homework by hand. I’ve tried it both ways and while LaTeX is incredibly nice to look at, it’s hard to solve a problem based on that code. It is usually a lot faster to work by hand and if you really care about aesthetics, put in the extra time typesetting. That extra time is quite small once you lean the language. I did find that while writing up solutions for my students where legibility is important, I would typically take that extra time to typeset my hand-written solutions. I never really did for my own homework, though.</p>