Word/Powerpoint/TexPoint

Word and powerpoint are extremely powerful and popular, but not necessarily the best software for mathematical articles and presentations. If you do need fancy decorations, animations, word/powerpoint are your only choice. However, if you are going to have tons of mathematical formulae in your article or presentation, you would do better to turn to latex. As a rule, mathematical formulas come out better under latex, than in Word (there is that problem of MS Equation Editor automatically resizing the formulas so none of them are the same size as the other). A word of caution though, while an experienced LaTex user can produce phenomenal outputs, it takes a while to get that good. If you are writing a book, a thesis, or other lengthy text, LaTex is extremely useful. If you are writing up a project report due tommorow, there is nothing more frustrating than trying to figure out a command to put your latex picture in exactly the spot you want, or trying to create a pretty looking table. My advice to those unfamiliar with TEX, is to start a couple of days early or switch to Word.

However, with the help of a powerpoint add-in, you can have beautiful formula in your powerpoint presentation. To do this, you need to install^7.1

• MikTex http://www.miktex.org, a windows version of latex
• Ghostscript and ghostview http://www.cs.wisc.edu/ ghost, viewer and converter of ps files.
• TexPoint http://raw.cs.berkeley.edu/texpoint, a latex add-in for powerpoint.

Please refer to TexPoint web page for more information. TexPoint allows you to use latex command along with your regular text. For example, you can insert

\alpha_0 \times \beta^* \rightarrow \Gamma

and use a hot key or menu item to convert it to

$$\alpha _{0}\times \beta ^{*}\rightarrow \Gamma$$

The magic underneath is that TexPoint calls MikTex to compile and obtain a ps file and then uses ghostscript to convert the ps file to a windows bitmap file and then inserts it into powerpoint.