Paper writing time

It’s not often I get a chance to write a paper for submission to a journal or meeting. But when I do, I always seem to be torn between choosing to write it using plain old MS Word, or going with TeX/LaTeX. I’ve always liked look of TeX generated documents. Problem is I’ve learned enough TeX/LaTeX to be able to generate some simple equations, but still haven’t learned enough to make a full fledged document. A couple of TeX books sit on my shelf to help me learn more (one of them seems to be missing…), but it’s always a slow process, because some of the things I end up wanting to do always seem to be things that have a hard time finding solutions to.
And then it comes to crunch time, and usually I end up falling back to MS Word, because it’s quick and easy. Just doesn’t look quite as nice or sophisticated though.
This time, though, I’m determined to do it in TeX. I have a working TeX environment in the form of MikTeX and what appears to be a decent TeX editor in TeXnicCenter (used Emacs before).
Time to go get started…