Composing Mathematics Papers

I was just wondering if anyone had recommendations for programs/document editors that are good for putting together professional-looking formulas and papers? Free and Windows-compatible is always nice, but "free" non-windows apps would work as well. A quick googling led to nothing of use.

Thanks guys.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX

Which is the de facto way of composing mathematics papers, so it's genuinely surprising one could overlook it.

>>1
install miktex, texniccenter, take a look at lyx, /thread

The equation editer in office 07 was good enough to do my highschool stuff in. Havn't tried it for anything higher though (took physics, chemistry, Maths C (Queensland's highest maths course)).

Talk to the math department at your local college.  All the professors there use LaTeX or Microsoft Word.  Look at the papers in LaTeX and the ones in Word.  The choice is obvious... LaTeX is free and everything looks like it came out of a technical journal, Microsoft Word is expensive and makes everything look terrible.  By the way, when I say that everything LaTeX makes looks like it came out of a technical journal, I mean it.  It's hard to write LaTeX that doesn't look like it came out of a math journal.  LaTeX is not as easy to use, but it is very mature and there are books on it.

MS Word is good enough for high school, I'll give >>4 credit for that.  But it is not really good enough for college math, and it is downright embarrassing in grad school (well, in some disciplines... they still use underlining in English departments, as if someone forgot to tell them that they don't use typewriters any more).

>>5
Well, if you fuss around enough with the fonts and such, I'm sure you could make something in Word that looks just as good.

That's not the point, though.  The bottom line is Latex is just a million times easier once you know how to use it.  You could spend 15 minutes in Word setting up some triple integral or whatever that would take 45 seconds in latex.

Speaking of LaTeX, I'm a noob at it in need of tech support.

I have MiKTeX, and WinEdt (and TeXnicCenter), and I want to install (if that's the right word) a .cls file that I need to compile a certain .tex document. How do I install said .cls file?

>>7
i dunno lol

this might say, tho: http://tobi.oetiker.ch/lshort/lshort.pdf

Microsoft Word is expensive
lol

LaTeX is the lingua franca of Mathematics journals. This is a pretty good resource form the American Mathematical Society http://www.ams.org/tex/amslatex.html

>>6

Can you really fuss with the fonts? I mean, not only the choice of characters for symbols and such, but the scale of the characters in relation to each other is just atrocious.

You're all fucking idiots for debating with trolls/retards/whatever. LaTeX is the obvious fucking answer and everyone knows it.

>>7
put \usepackage{package_name_without_cls} at the top of your tex file, just below \documentclass

where the cls file needs to be depends on your tex installation, sometimes just having it in the same directory as the tex file you're editing is enough.

>>12
Thanks, but unfortunately this hasn't solved my problem. My home installation seems to be missing some files so I think I'll just have to compile on my university's network.

>>12
Actually .cls files are document classes and set with \documentclass.