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LaTeX Notes

Why LaTeX?

  1. You only worry about the contents and LaTeX does the rest about appearance: It generates a document which looks beautiful.
  2. Nothing beats LaTeX on typesetting mathematical equations.
  3. It has BibTeX for managing bibliographies and citations. Formatting references and numbering them is done automatically.
  4. It does the numbering of the equations, theorems, lemmas, figures, tables, chapters, sections etc etc automatically (it automatically renumbers the items in a document after you insert or remove equations, figures, tables etc).
  5. I am sure there are even more reasons to use LaTeX...
It is best to see an example to appreciate its capabilities. Please have a look at the "Writing your first article: How to start using LaTeX" example below.

Using LaTeX

Using LaTeX on Linux is easy if you use one of the commonly available Linux distributions (I recommend ubuntu), basically you don't need to do much, make sure to get TeX-Live packages installed. If you want to use LaTeX on Windows, look here.

Writing your first article: How to start using LaTeX

(I have tested the following procedure on pizzeria. It works for me, and it should work for you too if you use a Linux installation, make sure that LaTeX modules are installed.) The example shows how LaTeX works, and I also show three ways of including figures into your document:

  1. Include a scanned image (scan the image as a TIFF file, Makefile and LaTeX does the rest)
  2. Create a diagram using Libre Office Draw. Libre Office Suite is free.
  3. Generate the graphs of the experimental data (gnuplot and Makefile automatically generates the graph whenever you change the data).
OK. Let's try:
  1. Open a working directory, say firstarticle. The command is mkdir ~/firstarticle
  2. cd ~/firstarticle
  3. Download this gzipped tar bundle of files firstarticle.tar.gz into the directory (firstarticle) you have just created.
  4. Issue this command: tar zxvf firstarticle.tar.gz.
  5. Let's have a look at the files that should now be in the current directory:
  6. Issue the make command to generate the firstarticle.ps and firstarticle.pdf. Just type make, and hit enter key.
  7. You can view or print the generated article with the following commands: ghostview firstarticle.ps or acroread firstarticle.pdf
  8. Start doing some modifications by editing the file firstarticle.tex. I suggest using emacs text editor for editing. emacs usually comes with AUCTeX which is an excellent package for editing LaTeX documents. Here are the reference cards for emacs and AUCTeX: emacs reference card, auctex-ref.pdf.
  9. Whenever you modify the firstarticle.tex and/or telecomms.bib, you need to reissue the make command.
  10. Keep learning more either by referring to the Web sites mentioned below, or printing this book latex2e-not-short-intro.pdf, or borrowing one of the LaTeX books at Monash Hargrave-Andrew library.

Preparing slides for your presentations

Here is an example from my lecture notes. There are various ways of preparing presentation slides with LaTeX. I've found the beamer package to be very useful. If you use ubuntu, you can install it very easily through the Synaptic Package Manager. To play with my example, do these:

  1. Download and untar wireless-nets.tar.gz
  2. Run make command to generate wireless-nets.pdf
You can then use Acrobat Reader in full screen mode (CTRL-L) to do your presentations.

Preparing a poster

There are nice LaTeX poster styles around. Alex has sent me a few sites that will be very useful for preparing the perfect poster:

Writing your thesis with LaTeX

I suggest you keep a separate tex file for each chapter, and a main.tex file that calls each of them (here is an example from my thesis: main.tex, note that I have commented out most of the chapters for this example). Also, it is better to write a Makefile (example from my thesis: Makefile.thesis) to process and typeset your thesis. Whenever you edit your thesis, you issue the command make to generate main.dvi and main.ps files. You can view the main.dvi file with xdvi main.dvi command, and view/print the PostScript version main.ps with ghostview main.ps command. Here is the bundle of files for you to start writing your thesis: thesis.tar.gz.

LaTeX documents

Useful Web sites

Topic LaTeX . { Edit | Attach | Ref-By | Printable | Diffs | r1.63 | > | r1.62 | > | r1.61 | More }
Revision r1.63 - 01 Nov 2012 - 05:04 GMT - AhmetSekercioglu
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