This page is intented to intoduce you to LaTeX, so that you can typeset documents of high quality, especially those containing a lot of mathematical expressions. Using LaTeX you can produce articles, books, reports, theses, posters, etc. There are many LaTeX tutorials and sources of information on the internet. This page only covers the material that is relevant for almost all applications; syntax and structure of the source files are not discussed on this page. If you want to have a more thorough (and lengthy!) information, there are a couple of good options:

• A Simplified Introduction to LaTeX, Harvey J. Greenberg
• Official LaTeX Usenet discussion group
• The Comprehensive TeX Archive Network
• Documentation and tutorials

The following programs are needed to create LaTeX documents under Windows:

A TeX/LaTeX implementation for Windows

The TeX/LaTeX distribution that I use is MiKTeX. This distribution already includes Yap: a DVI previewer.

A PostScript and PDF interpreter

GhostScript is the most common PostScript interpreter. You can download it from the wisc.edu website.

A PostScript/PDF viewer

GSView (install GhostScript first), it is also available at wisc.edu website. Even though PDF files can be viewed with GSView, Acrobat Reader is more popular for this purpose.

A text editor

A plain text editor such as Notepad can be used to type a LaTeX source file. However, there are IDEs which provide excellent tools for editing and compiling simultaneously. On Windows, WinEdt is an excellent IDE; another options are TeXnicCenter and WinShell, which are available at CTAN/systems/win32.

• R. Evans, Introductory Note 622: Creating an IDE for LaTeX on Linux with NEdit. UK: Cardiff University, 2003.
  [pdf]

Once you have a LaTeX source (TEX file) containing your document, the next step is to compile it. To illustrate the process, we will consider this source file and an encapsulated postscript picture (samplefig.eps). Then, at the prompt, enter:

latex example.tex

Several output files (example.log, example.dvi, etc) will be created. Resultant document can be viewed from the DVI file as follows (UNIX environments):

xdvi example.dvi

Or using the following command in a Windows system:

yap example.dvi

If any error occurs, it will be listed on the LOG file. If there are unresolved cross references, run latex again. DVI file cannot be printed directly; in consequence, DVI file must be converted to PostScript by using the program dvips:

dvips example.dvi

After that, example.ps file can be viewed or printed with the Ghostview program or with other PostScript viewer available in your platform. Finally, the PostScript file can be converted to PDF (e.g. for e-mailing or posting on the internet) by using the ps2pdf program:

ps2pdf example.ps

Nonetheless, most LaTeX users prefer an IDE instead of the command line procedure cited above. In this case, compiling is reduced to clicking on the appropiate buttons. We illustrate the process for WinEdt. In other LaTeX IDEs, sequence should be very similar (consult information on the Help menu of your LaTeX editor):

1. Compile TEX file: click on (Run again if there are unresolved cross references)
2. View DVI file: click on
3. Convert DVI file to PostScript: click on
4. View/Print PS file: click on
5. Convert PS file to PDF: click on
6. View/Print PDF file: click on

BIBTeX is an additional program to produce bibliography from a bibliographic database contained in a BIB file. Details of syntax can be found in Section 3 of Greenberg's book. Consider now a source TeX file, an EPS picture and this BIB file. Now, command sequence must include execution of bibtex program:

latex example2.tex
bibtex example2.tex
latex example2.tex
xdvi example2.dvi
...

Sequence of buttons in WinEdt would be: —› —› —› ...

To import a picture into LaTeX, it should be an EPS file. However, there is another program in LaTeX distributions called PDFLaTeX, which produces a PDF file directly from the TEX source code and handles figures in JPG and PDF formats. Consider the following files: example3.tex, samplefig.pdf; the final document example3.pdf is obtained by executing PDFLaTeX:

pdflatex example3.tex

Or by pressing the PDFLaTeX button in WinEdt: , the PDF file can be viewed/printed in Acrobat Reader: . A shorcut for these two steps is carried out with the following button: .

Even though there are many ways to make slides in LaTeX, I have been using PDFLaTeX for making presentations. To compile the LaTeX source code for the example presentation, you need to download this zip file. Then, extract files to a folder in your texmf directory (For MiKTeX users, I recommend extracting them to C:\texmf\tex\latex) and refresh the file name database: MiKTeX Options -> General -> Refresh Now.

A good option for MS Office users is TexPoint, which is a Powerpoint add-in that enables the easy use of LaTeX symbols and formulas in Powerpoint presentations. See this sample presentation.

Books:

• Oxford University Press style files
• Cambridge University Press LaTeX style file
• Princeton University Press macro files

Articles:

• Document class for IEEE Transactions
• Springer LNCS format

Slides:

• Creating Presentations in PDFLaTeX, Matt Welsh: Harvard University

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