Hari's Corner

I am doing quite a bit of technical documentation using LaTeX of late. I was searching around for some good LaTeX editors and I discovered Kile, which is an excellent LaTeX IDE with great features including autocompletion, syntax highlighting and a host of rich features which really allow productivity. Its help system also has some basic documentation on LaTeX. I find an IDE like Kile much more suited to my needs than LyX, which is a WYSIWYM editor. For instance, it's much easier to type in the math commands by hand than by using the graphical palette and the mouse. I guess that's the real strength of LaTeX: to prepare high quality technical documentation quite easily without having to worry about visual formatting (most of the time).

While Kile is a Linux-only tool, there is another LaTeX IDE for those using Windows called TeXnicCenter which should work well with MikTeX. While I haven't downloaded and tried it yet, the screenshots are quite similar to what Kile looks like. I don't think that autocompletion is a feature of TeXnicCenter though. For those of you who are interested in using LaTeX as a solution for your document preparation needs, you might want to take a look at these IDEs. It sure enhances productivity for me.