LaTeX: Abiword

Monday, 23 October, 2006

LaTeX is a mark-up “language” that users learn in order to write LaTeX documents. If you have ever done any HTML by hand then it is similar. The markup accesses the background macros that control all the layout. Below is an example of a LaTeX document:

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pre>\documentclass[12pt,a4paper]{article}\usepackage[pdftex]{graphicx}\usepackage{multicol}\begin{document}\section*{Notes on my new paper}Some notes simply typed in to the documen. I can also add some \textbf{bold} and \textit{italic}.\end{document}

So nothing desparately exciting or difficult, althought laying out graphics and tables can get quite fiddly. But of course remember that this is a typesetting program. Not a DTP one.

If this is all a bit of a large learning curve in the first instance then AbiWord is a good place to start. It is a cross-platform WYSIWYG word processor that is pretty good. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of Microsoft Word, but does do nearly everything you want and pretty well. Its also OpenSource (and if you want a portable version, pop over to the people at PortableApps). What makes AbiWord stand out a little more is (via plugins) its support for MS Word import (and others) and LaTeX export. It also has a pretty nifty equation editor that utilises an implementation of the LaTeX equation language. So you can import Word documents, save them as LaTeX files and run them through pdftex to create LaTeX PDFs. All very neat.

Footnote: I am currently using the PortableApps version, but the download link was broken. It seems to only be available on the UK Mirror service so I had to do a manual search over there. After getting it, there was no LaTeX export or equation editor present and the AbiWord documentation was a little lacking. You actually need to go to the AbiWord download page where there are three further downloads: import/export plugins, tools plugins and equation fonts. These are small executables that automatically go online and download the right packages for you (and make sure you select the correct install folder). Once done you can select the equation editor from the Insert menu and get some pretty equations going!

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