My friend messaged me today, asking me how he can make nice looking equations appear on a document. I explained that on a science forum, they use tex code and if you get the right forum, you can send yourself messages with the relevant equations he needs. Then he simply (saves) the equations as a picture to his hardrive, and then can paste them wherever suitable. This is just one way I have learned. Does anyone else have any other suggestions?
I write equations in MS Word and then convert it to pdf. The internal Word support makes writing equations quite easy to write.
Try TexMaker. http://www.xm1math.net/texmaker/ It's free, multi-platform and intuitive (provided you know the AMS codes) and automatically converts to pdf or several other formats should you desire
There are a few popular complete TeX systems available for download, if you're looking at generating documents. All of them will generate documents in .pdf format.