LaTeX

If you don't know this picture, you shouldn't study. Okay, that's a hyperbole. Nevertheless, LaTeX (/ˈleɪtɛk/ or /ˈlɑːtɛk/) is an important tool for writing scientific essays. It's not sufficient for a dotoral thesis or any other academic document with more than fifty pages to use Microsoft Word or Open Office. Unfortunately, in Germany many students and even post-graduates don't know LaTeX unless they study computational science, mathematics or physics. In other countries it is the tool for scientists, philosophers, mathematicians and engineers to write a scientific essay. It is most convenient tool to display mathematical formulas as you'll see below.

The high-level markup language allows you to produce ready to print and printer/monitor independent documents with easy numbering, cross-referencing, tables and figures, page layout and bibliographies. It takes you one week, at the most, to learn the language and saves you years of blood and tears.

Wikipedia shows a comprehensive example of a LaTeX document, here is the raw script:

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\title{\LaTeX}
\date{}
\begin{document}
\maketitle
\LaTeX{} is a document preparation system for the \TeX{}
typesetting program. It offers programmable desktop publishing
features and extensive facilities for automating most aspects of
typesetting and desktop publishing, including numbering and
cross-referencing, tables and figures, page layout, bibliographies,
and much more. \LaTeX{} was originally written in 1984 by Leslie
Lamport and has become the dominant method for using \TeX; few
people write in plain \TeX{} anymore. The current version is
\LaTeXe.
\newline
% This is a comment, it is not shown in the final output.
% The following shows a little of the typesetting power of LaTeX
\begin{eqnarray}
E &=& mc^2                              \\
m &=& \frac{m_0}{\sqrt{1-\frac{v^2}{c^2}}}
\end{eqnarray}
\end{document}

This is converted to following document:

If you want to learn LaTeX, you can find an excellent Introduction at Wikibooks here. LaTeX is build into Linux operating systems, but you can use proTeXt for Windows as well. If you don't use Linux, you can get LaTeX here.