First Encounter with LaTeX
A few days ago I have finished my assignment for one of my course, Advanced Web Data Management. The assignment was to create a research report (literature review) about a topic that related to the course. So, I chose AJAX as my topic.
One of the assignment requirement was the report has to be written using LaTeX. LaTeX? At first, I puzzled what LaTeX is. After a few research in the internet I found that LaTeX is some kind a method or format that has been developed specifically for creating technical report. For further information it can be found here. So, LaTeX is only a format and in order to use it we need a software. There are a lot of software that can type in LaTeX format. I used LyX in Linux environment. Actually the original format of LyX is not LaTeX, but it can read and export to LaTeX format, and it has interface like a normal word processing software. The other LaTeX software that I found show the document tags in the interface like writing a HTML file, so they are a bit confusing, especially for me, which new to LaTeX.
LyX Interface
In the beginning using LyX is a bit confusing, because it restricted and formatted my writing automatically depend on the style for the paragraph or line, such as “paragraph” style will treat the line of words as a normal paragraph, and “section” style will treat the line of words as a section head and LyX is automatically set a section number in front of the line. A good thing with LaTeX is that it allows the software to create PDF or DVI file directly. So, we can see the result file.
There is another confusion that I found when using LaTeX, it needs the writer to create a list of references in another file with “bib” extention, such as “refs.bib”, and then create a link to the reference file in the main document. But, somehow I could not manage to integrate the reference file and the main document into the PDF file, even though I tried using several LaTeX software. Until the time I submitted the report, I still faced this problem. 
Overall I like LaTeX because it helps me set the format of the document automatically. The only problem that I faced with LaTeX is only integrating the reference file with the main document. I think I need to have some research to solve this problem for future assignments.
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