LATEX is a document processing system specifically designed for writing scientific and technical documents. LATEX input files are standard ASCII text files, so you can use your favourite text editor on your favourite computing platform to prepare your documents. LATEX processors have been ported to just about every modern computing operating system, and are available for free dowload over the Internet from a network of web and ftp sites called the Comprehensive TEX Archive Network (CTAN).
For those trying LATEX for the first time, the author of LATEX, Leslie Lamport has written an engaging and accessible book called The LATEX document processing system. This book can be obtained from your local technical bookshop, or quite possibly from your institutional library. Otherwise, several introductory documents have been written, and are available free of charge from CTAN. These may well be enough to get started. A sample paper written in LATEX is provided here.
The alife8.sty file contains two additional commands over and
above normal LATEX. The first is \citeyear, which is used to
provide a variant citation style, as in Joe Bloggs (1999). To produce
this citation, use Joe Bloggs \citeyear(1999){bloggs99}, where
bloggs99 is the appropriate BibTeX key.
The second command is \aindx. This creates an entry in the
author index and inserts the authors names into the proceedings table
of contents. It is used as follows:
\author{\aindx{Per Bak}{Bak} and \aindx{Kim Sneppen}{Sneppen}}
The second argument provides the sorting order for the table of
authors -- please use your family name for this, usually the last
name for Western cultures.
There are also some WYSIWYG style front ends to LATEX, such as Scientific Workplace, which is a commercial product, and LyX, a freeware offering. These may make it easier for a novice user to get going. I haven't used either of these packages, as they do not provide full LATEX functionality, however LATEX code generated by them have proved acceptable in the past.