Introduction

I started learning LaTeX sometime in Fall of 2000, and I had to wade through a lot of crap to get a decent start. While this page won't teach you how to create LaTeX documents per se, it does concern some of the things I find/found most useful, from my perspective as a student (majoring in computer science and applied math). If you're in the same (or similar) boat as I was, I hope this page might save you from a lot of the same wading-through-of-crap.

LaTeX is a set of macros that makes Donald Knuth's powerful TeX typesetting system much easier to use. Like TeX, it excels particularly in typesetting mathematics, and can be used to typeset everything from letters to papers (most authors of math and computer science papers use TeX or LaTeX) to entire books (many math textbooks, and many CS theory books like CLR[S] for example). Maybe best of all, it's available for lots of platforms and is free to boot.

LaTeX satisfies pretty much all my document-producing needs, such as typesetting math homework, various other technical documents, and even plain old essays. There is a fairly significant learning curve when it comes to fiddling with little details though. There are also tons of extra packages you can use to do particular things, like create hyperlinked PDF documents (hyperref package + pdfTeX) for example.

Getting it / Using it

On UNIX, the most popular implementation is probably teTeX, and on Windows, I use MiKTeX (on Windows, you might want to use MiKTeX in conjunction with CygWin, which gives you a reasonably complete text-based UNIX environment to work in, if you're into that sort of thing--but that's a whole other story). There doesn't seem to be a lot of detailed documentation about LaTeX that's freely available, but the best I've seen is probably The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX 2e, which is a great way to get started. Eventually though, you'll want an actual book on LaTeX, and I guess there are two that are most commonly used: the one by Leslie Lamport (the creator of LaTeX) and the one by Kopka and Daly. I've heard that the latter is better overall, and that's the one I have. I would agree that it explains things pretty well and is fairly comprehensive, though it's sometimes a bit hard to find what you want. Also, The LaTeX Companion, which regards the various additional packages you can use with LaTeX, seems to be a popular book as well, though I don't have a copy of it.

Editing TeX/LaTeX Source Files

I use Emacs for all my LaTeX editing, on both Unix and Windows. If you're an Emacs user as well, you'll probably like AUC TeX (basically a much-enhanced tex-mode). A very popular (shareware) editor for Windows is WinEdt. Some other editors you might look into are LyX (Unix/Windows), which is evidently popular with some people, but has kind of an ugly UI, and Kile, a KDE3-based editor.

Other LaTeX Stuff

The easiest way to produce PDF documents is probably to use pdfTeX, which is an implementation of TeX that produces PDF output directly instead of DVI like the normal TeX. Correspondingly, you can just run `pdflatex latexfile' to make a PDF out of a LaTeX source file. There are a lot of useful packages out there for doing things, like doublespacing (setspace.sty), drawing diagrams (xypic), and much, much more. The place to find packages is CTAN, the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network. You might also want to take a look at the TUG (TeX Users Group) page for other stuff. Finally, a good place to find more arcane/specific information is the TeX newsgroup, comp.text.tex. You can search the newsgroup archives at Google.

Here are some things you might find useful:

Comments, suggestions? Email them to me.