Using LaTeX

Using LaTeX
( McCann )
Last Revision: July 2021
In the 1980s Computer Science professor Donald Knuth created a low-level document formatting package that he named TeX. The letters are supposed to be the Greek letters tau, epsilon, and chi, which is why "TeX" is pronounced "tech."

To make TeX easier to use, another computer scientist, Leslie Lamport, wrote a group of TeX macros and called the combination LaTeX (pronounced "LAH-tech" or "LAY-tech," but never "LAY-techs"). The current version is 2e, and has been the current version since 1994. LaTeX allows authors to create documents much like web page designers can create web pages in HTML: LaTeX is essentially a mark-up language. It is definitely not a word processor.

Why learn LaTeX? In the sciences and engineering fields, many conference papers and journal articles are created using LaTeX. It was created to construct documents that include complex mathematical expressions that are often difficult to create using ordinary word processing applications.

LaTeX Resources

Sample LaTeX Files:
- My Examples:
  - To encourage CSc 245 students to give LaTeX a try for formatting homework assignments, I created homework.tex. Its leading comments introduce pdflatex for formatting, it has examples that show how to format of a variety of typical 245 homework answers, and it even shows how to import images into your document. Comparing homework.tex to the formatted PDF version (homework.pdf) should allow you to see how to format most of your answers. To format the PDF yourself, you'll need the image file: plot2.png.
  - An earlier example I created is shell.tex. It demonstrates a some of the basics. Instructions for typesetting the document using the UNIX programs latex, dvips, and ps2pdf can be found in the comments at the head of the file. If you'd like to see the resulting document, here it is as a PDF file.
- Remote:
  - Here's an example from Stanford's School of Earth, Energy, and Environmental Sciences that mixes the LaTeX source and the output for easy comparisons.
  - To find additional examples, just search the 'net for "LaTeX examples".

Documentation:
- Online:
  - One of the best free references is The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX 2e. The subtitle used to be "Or LaTeX 2e in 87 minutes," but I see that it's now ~~139~~ ~~174~~ 157 minutes. This matches the number of pages, so ... read fast!
  - Another good basic reference is the LaTeX Wikibook.
  - The web pages of the TeX Users Group (TUG) have lots of TeX- and LaTeX-related information.
  - Some of the many TeX and LaTeX tutorials:
    - Andrew Roberts' Getting to Grips with Latex
    - David R. Wilkins' Getting Started with LaTeX
    - The Indian TeX Users Group's Online tutorials on LaTeX.
- Books:
  - Rather than list a bunch, here's TUG's page titled Books about TeX and Friends. I use my 1999 third edition copy of Kopka and Daly's book all the time. (The latest edition is the 4th, but it is pretty old at this point, so I can't recommend it unless you find a cheap used copy.)

Installations:
- Windows
  - I haven't installed a TeX/LaTeX package in a long time, but I used MiKTeX for various versions of Windows and was happy with it.
  - A variation of MiKTeX is TUG's proTeXt.
  - The cross-platform TeX Live package is available for Windows.
- Mac OS X
  - MacTeX is a version of TeX Live tailored for Mac OS X.
- UNIX / Linux
  - If you use Linux, most distributions come standard with a version of TeX and LaTeX. If yours doesn't have it, there's almost certainly a downloadable package available for your distribution. Otherwise...
  - TeX Live package is available for most Unix-like OSes.

Do you have a comment on this page? I'd like to hear it; you can email me at mccannl@acm.org.