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LaTeX Notes

Contents

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 example I put below.

Using LaTeX on Linux

Software installation

If you use one of the commonly available Linux distributions (I recommend ubuntu), you don't need to do much, make sure to get TeX?-Live packages installed.

Using LaTeX on Windows

Software installation

  1. MikTeX (I have installed the full set through the net installer)
  2. MSYS (I have downloaded and installed MSYS-1.0.10.exe)
  3. MinGW (I have downloaded and installed MinGW-5.1.3.exe)
  4. Emacs+AucTeX bundle. This emacs configuration file (rename as .emacs and place into your MSYS home directory) provides these useful emacs function keys.
  5. Subversion revision management (svn) client tools. We use Subversion for keeping our important documents in the department's SVN server (I have downloaded and installed svn-1.4.5-setup.exe)
  6. ghostscript and ghostview

LaTeX on Windows help

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 Open Office Draw. Open 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:
  1. Copy these files into a working directory: Makefile.tcpip, style-01.tex, tcp-ip.tex, hun94-1-2.tiff
  2. Rename Makefile.tcpip to Makefile
  3. Run make to generate tcp-ip.ps (it should contain 3 slides).
Generated tcp-ip.ps should look like this. I have used the Seminar style for the above example. I have also used the Acrobat Distiller to convert the tcp-ip.ps file into tcp-ip.pdf.

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.

Local LaTeX documents

Useful Web sites

Attachment: Action: Size: Date: Who: Comment:
Makefile.tcpip action 633 10 Feb 2003 - 00:58 AhmetSekercioglu  
tcp-ip.tex action 1848 13 Feb 2003 - 00:39 AhmetSekercioglu  
hun94-1-2.tiff action 372982 10 Feb 2003 - 00:59 AhmetSekercioglu  
style-01.tex action 2655 13 Feb 2003 - 00:25 AhmetSekercioglu  
tcp-ip.pdf action 139815 13 Feb 2003 - 00:46 AhmetSekercioglu  
tcp-ip.ps action 857063 13 Feb 2003 - 00:52 AhmetSekercioglu  
thesis.tar.gz action 366940 31 Mar 2006 - 02:50 AhmetSekercioglu modified main.tex to insert a blank page

Topic LaTeX . { Edit | Attach | Ref-By | Printable | Diffs | r1.51 | > | r1.50 | > | r1.49 | More }
Revision r1.51 - 29 Jul 2008 - 22:46 GMT - AhmetSekercioglu
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