LaTeX: from quick and dirty to style and finesse

• LaTeX Intro Home
• Quick start
• Environments
• Cross referencing
• More mathematics
• Figures to seminars
• Write right
• Art of ties
• Use colour
• Home pages
  • Tony Roberts
  • Maths and Comp
  • Sciences
  • USQ

Dept of Mathematics and Computing University of Southern Queensland Toowoomba, Australia

Links2Go Key Resource LaTeX Topic

Why LaTeX?

• It is arguably the premier typesetting package in the world. Knuth and Lamport have distilled for us the accumulated wisdom of generations of printers.

• The TeX system typesets documents with line and page breaks to maximise readability and appeal by avoiding as far as possible poor breaks and hyphenation.

• The defaults of LaTeX implement best practice for readability of your content, see Instructional typographies using desktop publishing techniques to produce effective learning and training materials

• It is simply the best package for documents containing mathematics. TeX can print virtually any mathematical thought that comes into your head, and print it beautifully. [Herbert S. Wilf, 1986]

• It is free on virtually every computer in the world.

• It is portable---stick to the standard commands and everyone can read and exchange documents.

• The source file is purely alphanumeric so it can be read by eye or posted by e-mail with no problems associated with different versions or binary files.

• LaTeX has the reputation of being hard, but in fact it is effectively the same as HTML!

• Weakness: LaTeX is not usually WYSIWYG (although you can use LyX).

Note that the 'X' in LaTeX or TeX is pronounced as a hard sound as in the 'ck' in 'teck'.

In a document of this size it is not possible to include everything that you might need to know, and if you intend to make extensive use of the LaTeX you should refer to a more complete reference. Instead this is an idiosyncratic introduction to the basic elements and philosophy of using LaTeX.

Online is a fairly complete LaTeX2e reference (162k,html), suitable for browsing, searching or access via its index. This reference document is the most useful thing to keep handy on your disk while you become more proficient with LaTeX.

Contents

Use the menu at the top-left to navigate to the following sections.

1. A quick and dirty start

2. Environments

3. Cross referencing

4. More mathematics

5. Figures, tables and seminars

6. Write right for readers

7. and possibly more, but not yet.

Other useful information sources

• Jon Warbrick's Essential LaTeX (177k,pdf) is a useful introduction to simple documents.

• But for a quick introduction to mathematics you will also need Essential Mathematical LaTeX (267k).

• The Not so Short Introduction to LaTeX2e (850k,pdf) by Tobias Oetiker et al, is a more complete introduction but somewhat longer.

• But I prefer An introduction to TeX and friends (436k) by Gavin Maltby.

• Graham Williams compiles brief descriptions of each of the many support packages and options for LaTeX. See the vast full (2004 version, 2,500 kbytes) or brief (up-to-date, 500 kbytes) TeX Catalogue Online

• The Comprehensive TeX Archives (CTAN sites), at various places around the world, provides just about everything you ever wanted to know about LaTeX and all its associated software. One site is at the Australian AARNET mirror in Brisbane. The CTAN sites are so comprehensive that one rarely can figure out where to go to find the desired information. However, search the site and the catalogue via the Search CTAN web page.