Creating documents in LaTeX

I am in the middle of a technical document writing project that involves formatting math formulas, keeping track of cross-references, and multiple section levels.  The usual format for writing a project such as this is LaTeX, which enables the writer to concentrate on writing and not all the typesetting and references involved in the document creation.  Another advantage to the format is that a very nice PDF file can then be created directly from the LaTeX document.

I certainly knew I did not want to  try writing this document in OpenOffice or Word.  OpenOffice because it becomes very challenged with complex documents. Both programs suffer when doing cross referencing, bibliographies, and the math add-ons are clumsy and in-elegant.

I came upon a document processor call LYX that allows you to type in the text and enter the LaTeX formatting commands as you go along.  The commands are entered transparently as you designate each document environment.  The program has a nice math toolbar which make formatting complex equations very simple. Although the program does not a have a spell check built in, one can be added from a third party source.  Many templates are available to allow the document to conform to submission standards to scientific and professional journals.

After the document is complete, it can be exported as a pure LaTeX document, saved as a PostScript document, or saved to PDF.  There is a add-on available under Linux to format the document in the DocBook (XML) format.  Although much of the typography will no doubt be lost, there is another small program to change LaTeX language formulas to small PNG files to insert into the xml file.

For some of the figures in the project, I am going to try the LaTeXDraw program, which enables you to draw svg format files that can be embedded directly as vector art in LYX.