There are many TeX systems available. A TeX system includes the editor, compiler, previewer, converters. Possible combinations are...
System
Frontend
- WinEdt is a worth-the-pay fronend: easy to use, feature rich and flexible.
- LyX is a very good choice for beginners, as well as experts.
- Texmaker is a free LaTeX editor released under the GPL license. It integrates many tools needed to develop documents with LaTeX, in just one application.
- WinShell is a free multilingual integrated development environment (IDE) for LaTeX and TeX.
- eclipse + TeXlipse: The combination is a very nice frontend. Features include folding, macros for many tasks.
- TeXnicCenter is a feature rich integrated development environment (IDE) for developing LaTeX-documents on Microsoft Windows (Windows 9x/ME, NT/2000/XP) freely available under GPL.
Chinese preprocessor
- cwTeX: I prefer this one over CJK when using WinEdt.
- LyX supports Chinese using CJK. See this article.
Postcript compiler
- Ghostscript can convert dvi files to postscript or pdf format.
Image converter
- Imagemagick is a free software suite to create, edit, and compose bitmap images. It can read, convert and write images in a variety of formats (about 100) including GIF, JPEG, JPEG-2000, PNG, PDF, PhotoCD, TIFF, and DPX. Use ImageMagick to translate, flip, mirror, rotate, scale, shear and transform images, adjust image colors, apply various special effects, or draw text, lines, polygons, ellipses.