For the curious These pages are really intended for those who already have some familiarity with LaTeX. But if you have reached this page and are curious, then read this classic LaTeX advocacy, and the opening page here (and for more advocacy about the beauty of the output see here). My short introductory guide to the ‘LaTeX Philosophy’ will help give you a clearer sense of what it is all about, as will Charlie Tanksley’s useful Latex for Philosophers guide
Getting started To explore further, go to this Cambridge intro page of useful links. There is also a mass of on-line documentation linked at the TeX User Group.
Learning more It can produce wonderful output, and once you get the hang of it, the basics of LaTeX are simple. But it can be a bit of a brute to beat into submission if you want to go beyond basics. For help, there is a mass of online documentation, including The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX and the LaTeX wikibook. For (a lot) more there is a 4th edition of Kopka and Daly’s Guide to LaTeX and a giant 2nd edition of The LaTeX Companion. While neither is perfect, both are strongly recommended. (You can freely download the Companion‘s very useful Chapter 3: Basic Formatting Tools.)
Math mode If as a logician you need to explore beyond the basics of the ‘math mode’ in LaTeX, then you may well find Herbert Voss’s document Math Mode particularly useful.
More fonts If you want a LaTeX document not to look like a standard LaTeX document use the memoir class to redesign the standard page layouts; and then use some fonts other than the default Computer Modern. For a review of what is available free, see The LaTeX font catalogue from the Danish TeX User Group. Or you can install your favourite commercial PostScript fonts to use: consult The Font Installation Guide (Philip Lehman, 2004: don’t be daunted — it is a lot easier than it might initially seem), or Installing Fonts for LaTeX on OS X (Bruno Voisin and Bob Kerstetter, 2004). For more on font use, see the MacTeX wiki page here.
Which maths fonts Substituting for the standard Computer Modern text fonts makes raises issues about which is a good choice for a matching maths font. There is a gallery of options in the 2nd edition of the Companion. See also info about fonts (the LaTeX FAQ), the extensive links page Fonts for mathematics (Luc Devroye), and the Survey of free maths fonts for LaTeX (Stephen Hartke).
A better LaTeX class The memoir class (Peter Wilson, 2001 – 2010) is a major LaTeX add-on which is well worth highlighting here as it (a) is not covered in the Companion, but (b) is especially useful for anyone involved in writing long documents, logician or not. Its very long manual is full of good advice on digital typography. But since the manual is so long, you might find like a shorter introduction, e.g. in this presentation, to help decide if it is for you. (Memoir is now included in standard LaTeX distributions, but it’s worth checking for updates. For installation instructions, scroll to the end of the “readme” file.)
LaTeX without tears Lyx is a front-end which allows you produce LaTeX documents without actually learning LaTeX. You can use it pretty much like a normal (though rather more intelligent) wordprocessor, and so it has a less steep learning curve than Latex. In addition Lyx has features which ordinary LaTeX editors lack, such as a document outliner, and change tracking. Some swear by it. Find out about it here.
XeTeX — going beyond LaTeX You have to do some work to get standard LaTeX to play nicely with fonts beyond a narrow range. Further, while your editor will probably support directly typing e.g. accented characters and Greek, LaTeX requires you to enter using code. It would be nice to be able to handle fonts easily and to be able to use the capacities of your editor in text entry. XeTeX is designed to do this, while still handling (most) LaTeX commands. Here’s the XeTeX page. (However, little introductory help is available for beginners, or even for those pretty familiar with LaTeX: and I suspect only geeks will get something out of the XeTeX Companion.)
unLaTeXing I hesitate to include this! But if you need to make your documents look like ordinary wordprocessed files for conservative journal editors, see philosophy.sty (Gregory Wheeler, 2007)
Word count TeXcount has been recommended (allows you to do things like mark bits of a document to be omitted from the word count). (Einar Andreas Rødland, 2005-9)