How to do homework for a class in Symbolic Logic on my computer?

Question

School starts in 1.5 weeks and I'm taking a course in Symbolic Logic. Here is a quote from the syllabus:

You need to keep a notebook with all your homework in it. This notebook can take one of two forms. 1. A looseleaf (or some kind of removable/replaceable page notebook) or 2. A folder (aka subdirectory) on your computer. The latter is only recommended for true computer geeks who like figuring out how to work with symbols (e.g., ∃, ∀, ⊃, ⊢, →, ↔). I will periodically collect homework.

I would like to try and do homework on my computer, if only to see if I can do it, even though in the long run I'll probably get frustrated and just use paper.

What do you recommend for this type of document? I assume it'll be a mix of words and equations with the above symbols. Is there a good special program for this, or instructions for doing this in MS Office 2010 or OpenOffice? Is this a good application for L^AT_EX, and if so, how does someone with no L^AT_EX knowledge (me) learn enough to do my homework? Is it even worth the trouble or should I just stick with deadtree?

My primary OS is Windows 7, if it makes a difference.

Answer 1

For "a mix of words and equations with symbols" I'd clearly recommend using latex. This is a good introduction.

Answer 2

GNU Emacs + AUCTeX works fine for me.

Answer 3

I would concur with the suggestion that you should use LaTeX. I'm bothering with a separate answer to strongly discourage the use of MS Word with symbol fonts for logical notation. Before I learned LaTeX, I'd tried to write up logic in word processors (both Word and, later, OpenOffice). It was deeply frustrating when my documents got quite messed up when I moved from one computer to another and found myself working without the symbol fonts I had at my disposal when I wrote the documents. (Yes, there are ways around that problem, but it nevertheless seems worth the warning.)

Answer 4

One variant, among many, is to use a GNU Emacs text editor with Org-mode extension, which is built-in in Emacs. Org-mode supports embedding LaTeX, thus you may write in an easy to learn and use markup language and only write LaTeX where you absolutely need them, without the need to learn LaTeX deeply.