PSTricks

( This morning I asked the account manager what his gut feeling was about the job for which I was interviewed last week. He had an 80% feeling about it. I was more worried because the relationship between the prospect and us was very thin. All we had done was acting upon a request which had been sent to probably every IT company in the country. My position is still 'idle' )

Eventually I want to be able to write mathematics of my own. Besides being able in math, writing math requires some special computer skills. Mathematics is usually not written with a word processor although Word has a nice formula editor nowadays. Writing beautiful mathematics is possible but at the cost of a steep learning curve. The tools to know are MiKTeX and TeXnicCenter. But what about illustrations? For that I discovered an amazing set of tools. PSTricks and LaTeXDraw. PSTricks is a set of commands to include graphics into TeX. LaTeXDraw is a wysyiwig graphics to PSTricks converter. Seeing is believing. This toolset makes it possible to add professional looking graphics to your documents. I think it is worth the steep learning curve. For common graphics a wealth of examples is available anyway.