Typesetting

You are not required to typeset your homework solutions; however, it is an easy way to improve the legibility of your documents. Many Allen School students learned to typeset in this course. We have a few suggestions for typesetting.

Option 1: LaTeX (through overleaf)

Tl;dr: Use LaTeX if you are strongly considering graduate school or anticipate taking many optional math-heavy courses (theory courses, or courses in the math department), and so want to learn to use the full LaTeX language.

LaTeX is the standard tool for typesetting mathematical materials. While it takes some time to learn, it will likely pay for itself in the long run. You can even use LaTeX in places like Ed and Facebook Messenger!

These resources may be helpful for you to get started with LaTeX, with thanks to Adam Blank:

• A homework template that you can use. Here is a preview of the rendered result.
• A How to LaTeX tutorial, including specific information on how to use the template.

Overleaf is an online editor that spares you from having to install LaTeX locally. Overleaf has some documentation, but you might want to read this how-to-overleaf document first.

LaTeX is the tool used by CS researchers to write papers, and by mathematicians and computer scientists to typeset mathematics, but (especially with overleaf) compiling can take a few seconds, and if you make a mistake, the error message you get may be difficult to interpret (much like error messages you get for compilation errors in Java).

The learning curve for complicated layouts (e.g., tables and images) can be quite frustrating.

Writing LaTeX feels like writing code---you type things, and then eventually compile (and hope you didn't make a mistake and need to debug). While this gives you very significant power to make documents look very nice, it also means a perfect document can be slow to produce.

Option 2: Parchmynt

Tl;dr: Use Parchmynt if you want to start learning LaTeX, but don't want to hit the most annoying parts yet, and are ok with a less-tested editor.

Parchmynt was designed by some recent UW alums to make it easier to learn LaTeX. It will let you use LaTeX syntax (say to write a formula), but gives you a WYSIWYG editor that makes it quicker to create complicated things like tables.

Because Parchmynt embeds "real" LaTeX, if you decide to learn LaTeX later, everything you've learned (e.g., command names you've memorized) will transfer over. It could be a good stepping stone for eventually getting to the full power of LaTeX.

Parchmynt is still relatively new (about a year old). The developers are happy to receive bug reports, but please treat it as a new system with a small team maintaining it in their spare time as a passion project (e.g., you shouldn't expect instant fixes if you report a bug, and you'll want to save work regularly).

We recommend watching this demonstration video of Parchmynt to see how it works.

Option 3: Microsoft Office

Tl;dr: Use Office if you aren't worried about learning LaTeX and want to get something that looks fine as fast as possible.

Microsoft Word has equation mode which allows you to insert mathematical text into a word document.

Because it's in Microsoft Word, creating tables and other complicated objects is usually familiar, and much easier than in the other options we've listed here.

Equation editor's output is usually a bit ugly, but it's legible (more legible than handwriting). There is little overlap between Equation Editor commands and LaTeX commands, though, so it's not a good stepping stone to full LaTeX.