Resources for Scientific Writing: LATEX

The writing tools I use for white papers, cases, and class reports are:

• Microsoft Word
• OpenOffice
• Google Docs - to share with friends (most informal due to lack of templates and not friendly in terms of formatting and shortcuts)

1. Figures/Tables/Equations: very easy to write and automatic number of equations etc.
2. Higher control on formatting and fonts unlike MS word.

What I use for scientific writing: LATEX

LATEX is a typesetting program that is based on document markup language very similar to html (hypertext markup language). Key benefits of LATEX are:

Download LATEX here:

LATEX plugin for powerpoint slides: IguanaTex, Texpoint (paid) or beamer.

LATEX plugin for excel to convert excel tables to LATEX format. excel2latex

LATEX forums: 
http://tex.stackexchange.com/ : Stackexchange for TeX

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX : Wiki for LATEX

I have seen a few online (cloud based) websites forLATEX, that might be the future of scientific writing, where authors can collaborate online to write articles, and possibly integrate with Journals/ Publishers.

https://www.sharelatex.com/, http://www.scribtex.com/

Then for this blog I use http://www.texify.com/ or http://www.codecogs.com/latex/eqneditor.php to write latex based equations as rendered images into html code.

People are usually scared to start with LATEX as it is typically not WYSIWYM /ˈwɪziwɪm/ (an acronym for "what you see is what you mean") . Lyx is a downloadable software for Windows/Mac that is based on TEX and is WYSIWYM. ( http://www.lyx.org/)