Are you writing a thesis? A book? An article for a technical journal? If your document is long or contains a lot of equations, a bibliography, figures and tables, or cross references, consider using LaTeX.
LaTeX, a document preparation system based on the TeX language, which was designed especially for formatting mathematical and scientific text, is not a WYSIWYG program like Word; instead, it uses text markup that looks similar to HTML.
LaTeX handles long, complex documents with ease, does not crash, never corrupts your files, is not susceptible to viruses, is available for just about any computer platform, and produces output of the highest quality (particularly equations).
And, if you are writing a thesis, a local "thesis" template that meets the requirements of the Rensselaer Graduate School is available.
Although this ACS course will be taught on UNIX workstations, LaTeX is also used world-wide on both PCs and Macs, and the language is the same on all platforms. So, what you learn will apply on whatever computing system you use, and give you a foundation to continue working with LaTeX.
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