LaTeX Resources

LaTeX is a typsetting program (pronounced "Lay Tek") that is used by most if not all professional mathematicians and physcists for writing papers, articles and books. Its main virtue is that documents written in LaTeX are portable, small and most importantly beautifully typeset. The original author of TeX, Donald Knuth, is a mathematician who also had a career as a typsetter in the pre-computer typsetting days. I will be giving you a brief introduction to LaTeX in two CAL labs. The best way to learn LaTeX, however, is to use it and the best way to do that is to download the necessary elements of LateX which are listed below.

The main element of LaTeX is the LaTeX interpreter, which reads a text file with LaTeX commands (usually saved as a *.tex file) and produces a typset document (with the .dvi ending). Since LaTeX is in the public domain, there are several different implementations. The most popular for the Windows platform is MikTeX . Download and install the basic MikTeX system.

Since you we will be including graphics in your documents and you will probably want to convert your document to portable document format (PDF) you need to download Ghostscript. This is an interpreter for the Postscript language and PDF. Download and install the latest stable release of AFPL Ghostsrcipt.

In order to create a LaTeX document you need a text editor. There are many freeware text editors that are enhanced for LaTeX. We will be using TeXnicCenter which serves as both a text editor and a shell. On my home machine I use the shareware program called WinEdt which I prefer, but which only has a 30 day trial before you have to pay up. TeXnicCenter should be should be fine. Download it and install it on your system.

If you are running a LinuX or Mac system it is likely that you have some version of TeX already installed on your computer. Check your documentation. If not let me know and I'll point you in the right direction.

For references on how to use LaTeX you can use the TeXnicCenter help file. A more comprehenisve guide is The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX2e, which at over 100 pages is quite comprehensive.