I love Latex

No, really. I really, really love Latex. As in it's a little bit pathetic how sad I got when I found out I couldn't use it for one of my essays in another class because they are jerks insisted on Times New Roman.

(In retrospect I think you can actually finagle Latex into showing a Times New Roman like font face but at that point, what's the use, it already looks like something from Word. Luckily Cog Sci doesn't seem to mind if I don't use Times as long as my citations are still okay. Come to think of it I really should be working on Cog Sci at the moment...)

But that's not why I love Latex. No, I love Latex because of how amazingly easy it can be to create mathematical formulae and things, and it even has IPA symbols for geeky wannabe linguists like me, which is just so awesome, and and and and then, when we started automata, I found a site that helped me make this for assignment 3:

which just looks so pretty.

Here's some code!

First you have to add the tikz package and tell Latex what you want from it:

And then, you can just go to town:

You can also make the arrows dashed and dotted and such (although I didn't). All you need to do is change the [->] bit to [->, dashed] or dotted, as you like. Double-headed arrows with [->>].

(In all fairness, Latex has its shortcomings - in that it compiles really strangely and hitting make sometimes requires you to make several times over because Bibtex isn't complying or things like that. But I can't even imagine how painstaking it would be to overthrow all of Tex live to make the underlying code neater, so I'll happily forgive others for not doing it either. Also unlike Microsoft Word it's free. Freeeeeeee.)