LaTeX is different from your average word processor such as Word or Writer. We call these What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editors, because, well, they let you visually edit your documents in ...
To use LaTeX, you need 3 things: A text editor, a PDF viewer, and a (La)TeX compiler. For each of the three, there are many options to choose from. Note that a LaTeX distribution usually comes with ...