## <3 LaTeX <3

A fair portion of my supposedly study-oriented weekend was spent in the recovery of ebooks deleted in an iOS update gone wrong, and the ongoing hunt for a worthy ePub reader for my iPad.

Besides my iPad, I have spent most of today (Sunday) in the company of an old friend, that most excellent of typesetting solutions, LaTeX. Microsoft Word is a fantastic tool for quick documents, but its very nature as a WYSIWYG editor makes it leaves much to be desired as a tool for quality typeset documents. There is no separation of style and content (like HTML and CSS for instance).

Because of this unholy marriage of elements, I can spend as much time in the play of dials and sliders as I do writing. LaTeX strictly separates content and style-I define spaces, typefaces, indentations, fonts, and other styles at the start of the document, and then as I write I simply insert the tags as ncesessary. Example “hello world” .tex file:

\\documentclass{article}
\\title{Cartesian closed categories and the price of eggs}
\\author{Jane Doe}
\\date{September 1994}
\\begin{document}
\\maketitle
Hello world!
\\end{document}