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:
- A handy little cheatsheet by David Carlisle (in LaTeX source format)
listing the commands for various math symbols and operators and such can be
found here. You'll want to compile it before
you use it, of course.
- A little style file (lrmatrix.sty) I
hacked up to allow left- and right-aligned AMS-style matrices (the matrix
environment in AMS-LaTeX only allows centered elements, so far as I know).
- I had a lot of trouble trying to find a style file for writing English
essays in MLA style (no surprise, I guess), so I made my own (mla.sty). It's tweaked to produce output similar to
Microsoft Word with 1-inch margins. Here's a sample
essay demonstrating its usage, though I make no claims about the quality
of writing.
Comments, suggestions? Email them to
me.