LaTeX Help

LATEX, written as LaTeX in plain text, is a document preparation system written by Leslie Lamport for the TeX typesetting program originally development by Donald Knuth.

Getting Started

This entry is contributed by Tasha and Jayson

Windows users

  1. Download Miktex setup wizard (assuming hard drive space is not an issue). Use the wizard to download the full package, and then run it again to install the full package from a local directory. Download takes a long time (~262MB), but can be interrupted and will resume where it stopped.
  2. Download and install GhostScript . It is the file gs704w32.exe under Windows.
  3. Download one of the editors listed here . Two popular editors under Windows are WinEdt and EMACS . In WinEdt, you can either click the PDFLaTeX button on the toolbar, or go to Accessories | PDF | PDFLaTeX. file.tex will be converted to file.pdf and placed in the same directory. You can view file.log if there were problems creating the pdf, or look at the errors in the command window which is opened during conversion, and typically not closed unless the conversion was successful.

MAC users can use Texshop

Linux users will most likely have LaTeX installed on their system by default.

A nice tutorial for beginers can be found here . The Typesetting Mathematical Formulae section has a very thorough list of mathematical symbols and how to get them with LaTeX. A good cheat sheet can be downloaded from here .

An Example

Download the files assignment.cls , hw.tex , bibfile.bib and epstopdf.exe in a directory. Compile hw.tex using instructions in hwcpy.pdf . hw.tex explains a few tricks in LaTeX and the formatting for the assignments.

Most recently updated on May 22, 2006 by Satya P. Mallick.