LyX, see here, is something I have been looking for a long time as a tool which uses LaTeX. It’s a ‘What You See Is What You Mean’ word processor. Unlike other LaTeX applications, this one gives you feedback what your document will look like as you type without bothering about the aestetics too much as in MS Word. Equations are inserted as you see them instead of code on one line. Tables and figures are also easily added as floaters which means after the document is processed in LaTeX, it they will be intelligently positioned. LyX also supports BibTex. It’s easy as without having to learn any code. Why would I bother spending and wasting time learning code and typing it when visually it goes so much faster and easier? LyX just got updated to version 1.5 beta 3 so have a go at it. You’ll love it! The only downside is that despite it can import and export your docs as TeX files, it doesnt port well to MS Word. So file sharing is a bit more cumbersome. But since artices can be submitted to journals as LaTeX files, this is a minor problem. I’m still in the stage of getting familiar with it but I can see already that it will save me lots of time later on when I just cant be bothered with the hassles you get in MS Word with inserting figures, captioning and formatting.
EDIT: I found a decent programme that will convert *.tex files to rich text formatting (*.rtf) for MS Word. Go here to download it (open sourceware).
