LaTeX on Mac OS X

May 28th, 2008 | by hantu |

For those who didn’t know, I am currently completing my Honours in Bachelor of Software Engineering with Monash University. I’ll talk more about the Honours project later on.

I have been using OpenOffice 2.4 for documents writing, including my research proposal for the Honours project. It worked quite well, but I have decided to switch to LaTeX to deal with documents writing (for the thesis).

LaTeX is a document preparation system for high-quality typesetting. It is most often used for medium-to-large technical or scientific documents but it can be used for almost any form of publishing [1].

To get LaTeX up and running on my MacBook, I downloaded the MacTeX package, and the installation was pretty straightforward. The only painful part is, it took away 800MB of my internet allowance, and I think you should know that it will take around 1.6GB disk space to install.

If you’ve not worked with LaTeX before, keep in mind that:

LaTeX is not a word processor!

If you want a decent word processor on Mac OS X, TextMate is what I am using.

Last but not least, always good to have this LaTeX guide around (I’ve had it since my first year in Monash, three years later, I’m using it again): The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX2e

ref:

  1. LaTeX project: An introduction

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