LATEX [^] is the standard at most universities. It is intended to provide high-level access to the power of TEX [^] but that is not really important. The greatest thing about Latex is that it automates tedious tasks such as referencing, cross-referencing, bibliographies, figures, tables, page-layouts, presentations. While most word-processing apps (like MS Word) can do most of these things, the nice thing about latex is that it is a scripting language so you can actually define new comands and redifine existing commands. There is also extensive resources on the net where you can download additional packages for type-setting code, algorithms, trees, graphs, parse-trees, and so on. Anything you need typed for engineering, mathematics, physics, chemistry (any field really) can be done in latex.
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