A few days ago, I set out to write the all the definitions required for my physics exam in one location. I didn’t want to do them by hand (so I could share it with other people), but Word the usual suspect pretty much sucks at equations. At first, I discovered the intuitive Tomboy Notes program for Linux. It was great, and there was a LaTeX (TeX is a typesetting language; LaTeX is an extension of it) plugin for it too. Alas though, it was very crashy, and the equations could not be exported as images. So I rang up my super internets friend (google) and found LyX.
LyX is a TeX editor for someone who just wants to get their work done and not faff around in the niceties of TeX. Don’t get me wrong, TeX is powerful and all, but it really is overcomplicated for something this small. It runs on Windows, Linux and MacOSX and exports to PDF, so using it was a win-win situation!
I hate to say it, but the language is actually intuative. Want to square root 3? \sqrt{3} in LaTeX will do that. Need to use greek letters like rho and delta? No problem, \rho and \delta should do the trick. The best part of the language is fractions. Simply typing \frac{1}{2} will give you a fraction of 1/2 (perhaps I should get TeX going in wordpress…).
Well, my physics sheet turned out just fine. If anyone wants to see it (it has information on circular and simple harmonic motion, large scale gravitation and impulse/momentum) you can find it here.