Brendan's LaTeX Page

Hopefully the information on these pages will help people new to LaTeX get started with it, and serve as a reference to those already familiar with it.

Why bother with LaTeX?

Here are a few reasons I feel it's worth it to get up to speed with LaTeX:

LaTeX is a standard format for submissions to many scientific journals and conferences. It is used commonly enough to have been called the lingua franca of the scientific world.
You can enter formulas quickly and easily from the keyboard without fumbling through pulldown menus.
The formulas you generate look significantly better with LaTeX than other approaches.
LaTeX will automatically number and link chapters/sections/subsections, as well as figures, equations, references, etc. This can save a lot of time when putting reports together since you don't have to remember you're talking about the fourth figure, for example, even if you wind up switching the order of things later.
LaTeX can automatically generate a reference list on the fly based on the items cited in the body of the document.
Along with the companion bibliographic system BibTeX, LaTeX allows you to use a common database of references for multiple documents (without having to copy/paste). The style used for citations and references in a document can be automatically modified without re-typing anything by simply calling a different BibTeX style file.
So in summary, LaTeX makes it easier to accomplish many document preparation tasks, and the end result looks better and more professional!

Getting Setup with LaTeX

In my opinion the easiest, most natural way to work with LaTeX is in a Unix or Linux environment with Emacs as the editor. As a sidenote Emacs also has built-in menus and formatting for a variety of common computing tasks including HTML, JAVA, and C++.

Windows Setup
There's a little bit of startup cost to working with LaTeX in Windows. I don't typically work this way so I'm not an expert in this approach, but I'll try to provide some quick instructions.

First, you need to install a version of LaTeX. It seems the most common for Windows is MiKTeX. This gets you the base platform and libraries necessary for the language itself.
Next, you need an interface to work with your LaTeX documents. Although any text editor will do, and you could probably get things to work through MS-DOS prompt commands, I'm guessing since you're using Windows that you're looking for a friendly GUI approach. Here are some options:
- Emacs - this free software actually has a version that will run on Windows. The version I got to work with my XP-Pro machine is here. Emacs probably has the best support of any editor for the combination of LaTeX and BibTeX (the bibliography database system that links in with LaTeX).
- TeXnicCenter - this is also free and probably a good middle ground for someone who trying to ween themselves off of clumsy pull-down menus as a method of entering mathematical symbols. It is also likely a good learning tool for LaTeX since there are a variety of GUI pull-downs for symbols, matrices, and other things you would like to enter in your document, and the LaTeX source is generated and displayed for whatever you click. So it is a pretty friendly way to get started with LaTeX, but the downside is there are no BibTeX templates built-in.
- WinEdt - this seems to be a popular choice for Windows LaTeX users, although it is not freeware. A 31 day free trial is available and after that a student license can be obtained for $30. Similar to TeXnicCenter, it is a friendly GUI interface with LaTeX, but the BibTeX support that would be very helpful for large projects is not there. You can still use BibTeX, it just won't be as easy as with Emacs.

For a much more complete guide to installing and using LaTeX in a Windows environment see this page by Claus Dethlefsen.

Unix/Linux Setup
There's no real setup to do in this case, the installation should be there and ready to go. If you are working in a Unix/Linux environment, simply type

emacs [yourFileName.tex] &

at the command prompt and you're on your way. To compile a file enter

latex [yourFileName]

and to view the output of your file in DVI format

xdvi [yourFileName] &

To generate a PDF file directly from your LaTeX source, type

pdflatex [yourFileName]

Recommended Reference Books

A great general reference to get started with LaTeX and to look up syntax for various tasks	A detailed reference on incorporating LaTeX with HTML, including detailed info on generating PDF files

Maintained by Brendan Hogan, comments or questions: bph4r@virginia.edu
Last Modified: Wednesday, 14-Nov-2007 02:31:25 EST