hello everyone. i was wondering if anyone was familar with the program latex and using it's many features for formating mathamatical equations (making equations look pretty like in the text books). if so, is there a linux version? is it complete? what do i need to run it? in my reading before the post i read alot about emacs...any conection? if anyone knows where i can download this or good documentation please get back to me. thanks a ton and keep on keeping on.

latex used to be on the linux distros. emacs is a text editor that is included with linux. very powerful if you get to learn the features. Search for them. I know there is emacs documentation with linux. latex has its own website.

Yeah, if you have linux, you can already try to type "latex" in a terminal. Then you'll see if you have it or not (but I'd say it's quite likely, if you got linux in a standard distribution)! I'd say that emacs is not at all user friendly in the beginning. It does not (always) implement the end-of-line, home keys in a nice way, for example... the colour highlighting does not (always) work fine (at least not at once). But the thing is that you can set it up almost exactly like you want it. Have your own key bindings, color setup. You can even use it to send mails, browse your directories, delete or create files... compile your sources (including LaTeX sources!) It's wonderful when it comes to find strings, and its clipboard management is just the best thing that has ever done in the whole texas, for a text editor. It takes a while to get used to it, but that's worth it! You can find a lot of (very) bad docs on latex online. If you want to get started seriously, i think you should go to the library and borrow a book!

Excelent...Thanks Everyone. I did find that Latex is installed. Originally I was not clear as to what it was. I knew it was a type setting program but I did not know it was freeware. I thought there was a whole little program that only did Latex with a fancy compile button that would only run in windows. Also, once i realized it could be written in basically any text editor i checked my favorite editor (Kate) and looked in its high-lighting options. it does have the high-lighting mode for Latex which is much nicer then struggaling with Latex in windows notepad. Again thanks Fred and Guathier. I am deffinetly going to look into and play with (probably break) emacs as well. Take care everyone!