LaTeX

As a wordsmith, I’ve gone through just about every word processor available on the Mac. A few I’ve run through during the years include WordPerfect, Word (97, v.X, 2004 and the upcoming 2008), Nisus Writer (Classic), Nisus Writer (Cocoa), Mellel, BBEdit, TextWrangler, TextEdit, OpenOffice, NeoOffice, Scrivener and many others.

For the record, I’ve settled on TextMate for most of my text editing and Apple Pages when I want to make things pretty.

Lately, I’ve gotten interested again in LaTeX. LaTeX is a typesetting system that’s been around for decades. It’s free and makes good looking documents. I’m using it at work right now to write some documentation and it’s wonderful for tasks like that.

It can handle your chapters, your table of contents, easy indexing and the formatting is a breeze. The work is written in a markup language with the writing wrapped in tags to create the environments. Running that file through the LaTeX filter creates a PDF document.

It’s nerdy as hell, but I like it.