Latex For Dummies

LATEX for dummies
LATEX for dummies
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The SWAN team

Delft University of Technology
Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences
Environmental Fluid Mechanics Section
P.O. Box 5048
2600 GA Delft
The Netherlands
: swan-info-citg@tudelft.nl
: http://www.swan.tudelft.nl
Copyright (c) 2012 Delft University of Technology.

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of
the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the
Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no BackCover Texts. A copy of the license is available at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl.html#TOC1.
iv
Contents
1 What is LATEX?
2 How to obtain LATEX?
3 Start using LATEX
4 Output formats
vi
Chapter 1
What is LATEX?
TEX (pronounced tech) is a typesetting language.
LATEX (pronounced lay-tech or la-tech) is TEX with a lot of macros that make it
easier.
Every mathematician uses it. Its also very widely used among physicists, engineers,
and other professionals who need to prepare technical documents.
LATEX does a good job for documents that need structure, allowing you the flexibility
to easily modify the text, without worrying about how its going to turn out.
To quote Donald Knuth (the inventor of TEX): It is intended for the creation of
beautiful books and especially for books that contain a lot of mathematics.
There are many different styles of LATEX documents. The most well known are: letter,
article, report, book and slides.
Writing LATEX is just like writing any other language, such as Fortran. You write
LATEX code in ASCII format in your text editor, then you compile it, and look at the
output file. In Fortran, your output is an executable program. In LATEX, your output
is a PDF document.
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
How to obtain LATEX?
You need to get two programs: MiKTeX and TeXnicCenter1 . They are free
anyway.
MiKTeX has all the LATEX stuff needed by Windows users.
TeXnicCenter is the userfriendly GUI program where you actually type your
code.
You need to install MiKTeX before you install TeXnicCenter, because TeXnicCenter needs to be configured to use the MiKTeX files.
Heres how to install MiKTeX:
Downloading the wizard will take a while. Live with it.
Go here http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/miktex/setup-2.4.1705.exe?download
and download it from a mirror.
After downloading the wizard, run it to download the MiKTeX package.
Then, run it again to install the MiKTeX package. Thus, youre going to end
up having used the wizard twice.
Heres how to install TeXnicCenter:
Installation of TeXnicCenter is pretty straightforward. Just make sure you do
this after installing MikTeX.
Go to
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/texniccenter/TXCSetup 1Beta6 31.exe?download
and download the setup file from a mirror.
Installation reference pages:
The Art of Problem Solvings LATEX installation guide.
Go to http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/LaTeX/AoPS L Downloads.php
1
Note to Linux users: LATEX is already available on Linux platforms.
Chapter 2
MiKTeX homepage http://www.miktex.org/setup.html
TeXnicCenter homepage http://www.toolscenter.org/
Chapter 3
Start using LATEX
Now you need to know the actual syntax and code to write LATEX and be able produce
mathematics or physics papers or just adapting the SWAN Technical documentation.
The format of a LATEX document is pretty simple:
\documentclass{}
... this is called the preamble ....
\begin{document}
... nice text and actual work here ....
... this is called the body ...
\end{document}
LATEX allows free form text input. This means that it does not matter how many
tabs, spaces you have, LATEX has its own idea of what your document will look like.
As it goes with teaching yourself any computer language, you learn more by just
trying things, looking at examples, and searching google for all other answers.
Here you find some links to the resources.
Go here first: http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/LaTeX/AoPS L BasicFirst.php
It is very good and brief.
Short Math Guide for LATEX
http://tex.loria.fr/general/downes-short-math-guide.pdf,
Michael Downes, American Mathematical Society
5
Chapter 3
The Not So Short Introduction to LATEX
http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/info/lshort/english/lshort.pdf
For a good tutorial, go to
http://www.tug.org.in/tutorials.html
This is a complete course for new LATEX users (note: very large PDF file)
http://tug.ctan.org/tex-archive/info/beginlatex/beginlatex-3.6.pdf
Chapter 4
Output formats
Many people output their TEX or LATEX into DVI format1 . But they usually end
up converting their DVI into Postscript or PDF. You dont need to know anything
about DVI.
Postscript is a different story. People use Postscript because it preserves the look of
the document. However, one can convert Postscript to PDF and make the file much
more portable.
With Ghostscript/GSView, you can open Postscript files and just look at them like
all is good. It is good to be able to do this and to be able to convert them to PDF.
If its something worth saving, youd rather have the PDF.
You can also convert Postscript to PDF using Adobe Distiller or using Go2PDF
which is free here http://www.go2pdf.com/product.html.
It is also possible to create HTML documents from LATEX files using LATEX2HTML.
For more information see http://www.latex2html.org.
DeVice Independent, a format LATEX generates which can later be converted to PDF or Postscript,
viewed on screen, printed etc.

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What is LaTeX used for?

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LATEX for dummies

LATEX for dummies

The SWAN team

Copyright (c) 2012 Delft University of Technology.

2 How to obtain LATEX?

3 Start using LATEX

Note to Linux users: LATEX is already available on Linux platforms.

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