latex for windows

LaTeX is supported on windows by MikTeX. I grabbed the small-miktex-2.4... installer thing. Installation was effortless. If this installation encounters the need for a missing package sometime in the future, it will go out on the internet and grab the needed package (with a prompt to the user for permission).
You may want to try WinEdt, a fine cut and paste editor designed to be color coded for LaTeX. It also has menu options to pipe directly into MikTeX. But it will nag you to pay after a while. I am so accustomed to gvim, that I cannot use WinEdt effectively.
Fortunately, gvim is available for windows, and is free. I grabbed the self-installing executable. Installation was effortless.
If you want gvim to recognize \be and \bea as equation environments, you will need to edit your _vimrc file, found within GVIM62\vim to add the third line seen in mine:
```
set nocompatible
source $VIMRUNTIME/vimrc_example.vim
source $VIMRUNTIME/moresyntax.vim
   .
   .
   .
```
Also drop my moresyntax.vim and moretex.vim into your GVIM62\vim\vim62 folder.
Suppose your are editing thefile.tex within gvim. You can execute MikTeX from within gvim, by entering:
```
:!latex %
:!yap thefile.dvi
```
From yap, you can send the .dvi file to a printer. You can also print to postscript file. If you want to view and print the postscript file, I believe you will need GSview and AFPL Ghostscript. You can make pdf files directly with MikTeX. Within gvim:
```
:!pdflatex %
```