When using Latex under Windows, TeXnicCenter and Miktex are my favorites at the moment. Although i consider Foxit PDF Reader a very good alternative instead of Acrobat Reader, Sumatra PDF supports some very neat features which are very useful when writing Latex Documents! When you click on a line in TexnicCenter, Sumatra jumps to the corresponding line in the PDF and vice versa (called forward/inverse-search).
Read this article
http://william.famille-blum.org/blog/static.php?page=static081010-000413
about configuring forward and inverse search with TeXnicCenter/SumatraPDF. Also a custom SumatraPDF build is available there.
Another useful addition to Latex is the Asymptote Language. It's a discriptive vector graphics language which can be used in conjunction with latex to produce nice looking graphics inside your latex document. The Asymptote package is available for all platforms and can be included into TexnicCenter (can be obtained here: http://asymptote.sourceforge.net/).
Read http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Wiki/index.php/Asymptote:_Advanced_C… to learn about the configuration steps for TeXnicCenter, Miktex and Latex!
- Configure Miktex to find the asymptote.sty and asycolors.sty latex files - copy them to miktex/tex/latex/ directory etc...
- Adjust TeXnicCenter to show error messages of Asymptote - Use Method 2 on the AoPS Website!
- Create a Asymptote config file in your User Folder - Subfolder .asy named config.asy where the ghostscript path to gswin32c is entered!
The config file should include the following lines:
import settings;
gs="C:\something\gswin32c";
The path needs to be adjusted to your configuration!
Step 3 is only needed, if you don't have an environment variable for ghostscript.