Handlin Home Work In a Printed Form

[Alkhimey]

Hi,

I am fresh undergrad student.
I have decided to handle all my homework in a printed form, this saves time and allows me to correct stupid mistakes without the need to re write whole pages.

I have tried several solutions, but none suits me best:

Open Office's math is too slow and as far as I know does not have shortcuts).
Open Office with MathType as OLE object. Fast an easy (MathType has the best UI in my opinion), but does not display the formulas correctly (after closing the edit window), and moving to another computers (even in a pdf form) makes a greater mess.
Lyx. Problematic with "right to left" languages. Math editor is not simple, as far as I know does not contain shortcuts. Needs time to get used to.

I am using Windows.

I would be very delighted to hear about any suggestions regarding the issue.

Thank you.

(If this is a wrong forum, please excuse me)

 

[fluidistic]

Personally I think that TeXnicCenter with MikteX would give you a very nice result since you can use Latex and save file in PDF. But it won't be as fast as you expect. Are you accustomed to write in Latex?

 

[Vanadium 50]

I'm not so sure this will save time.

I'm also not sure this will teach you not to make "stupid mistakes" - which is part of your education. While I am sympathetic to the idea that you shouldn't take too many points off for a slip-up, it's also true that there are teeming hoardes of students out there who never seem to be able to get a correct answer. They hand in a veritable parade of close-but-wrong answers, content to get most of the partial credit.

Finally, I would also recommend LaTeX. It will be more useful throughout your career than other options, and you won't be fighting it to get it to do something too complex for the other choices. It may take longer to learn at first, but the time saved in not trying to write workarounds will make up for it.

 

[alligatorman]

I agree with fluidistic and Vanadium. LaTeX is the best choice, though it may take you some time to learn. If you have the time to learn, I'd recommend it. It's not that difficult to learn the basics, and that would probably be enough for your homework.

Download Texnic Center with Miktex. There should be instructions on the Texnic center website (which happens to be down at the moment).

Play around with it, looking at online manuals and see what it can do.

Some good links:
http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Wiki/index.php/LaTeX:About
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX

 

[ks_physicist]

I never met a professor who would take off points for having a corrected and identified mistake on homework.

A single, straight, dark line through any mistake should suffice. Why complicate things?

LaTeX (as someone posted, TexnicCenter with MikTeX is AWESOME) does great for math work. I'm not familiar with LyX, but when I went looking for a Latex solution, TeXnicCenter and MikTeX were suggested by many.

An alternative might be to do your work on a tablet PC. Benefits of handwriting for diagrams and formulae, handwriting recognition, and you can flip it and type if you need to.