On Saturday 03 November 2007, Eugene Salamin wrote:
I use OpenOffice. I prefer it's equation editor to the one in MS Word, and documents can be converted to PDF for the convenience of others who dno't use OpenOffice. I haven't yet tried searching the generated text. OpenOffice is downloadable for free from http://wwwopenoffice.org , and runs under Windows, Linux, and Mac.
Those who want to write mathematics without using the arcane TeX language should consider TeXmacs and LyX, both of which offer many of the advantages of TeX combined with many of the advantages of a WYSIWYG word processor. In each case - you get to see your document in something resembling its final form as you write it - you can enter mathematics in a more equation-editor-y way - you get TeX-quality, or approximately TeX-quality, typesetting - the learning curve is considerably friendlier than TeX's but - LyX's presentation is not exactly WYSIWYG -- formatting details aren't finalized until you actually convert your document to PDF/PostScript/whatever - TeXmacs can be frustratingly slow sometimes - by default, at least, you get those TeX typefaces, which few people like very much (I don't know how easy it is to change this) - both have slightly funky user interfaces (though not to my mind anything like as much the Spawn of the Pit of Hell as MS's Equation Editor, unless that's improved a lot in the years since I last had to use it) -- g