LaTeX Introduction

1
LaTeX Introduction

• A CSUA Help Session

2
TeX History

• Written by Donald Knuth, Professor of Computer
  Science at Stanford
• Knuth was writing The Art of Computer
  Programming, a classic CS text.
• Existing typesetting methods were not good
  enough.
• He created TeX in the late 1970s.
• Also METAFONT, a font description language.

3
TeX Was Too Low-level

• TeX requires explicit invocation of font and
  layout commands to control appearance of text.
• Instead of saying \font\seccmbx20\sec\noindent,
  people wanted to say \section to start a section
  title.
• You could define your own commands, though.

4
Enter LaTeX

• LaTeX is a collection of defined commands.
• There is a \section command to write a section
  title, for example.
• Written by Leslie Lamport in 1985.
• Provides many more features
• e.g., the \section command provides for
  automatic numbering and table of contents
  generation if you want
• Most recent version is LaTeX2e.

5
Classes and packages

• These are LaTeXs method for extending it.
• Different documents have different classes
  (youll see this later for example there are
  article and letter classes).
• Packages allow you to call in extra features
• E.g., there is a package for inserting figures
  into your document.

6
AMS-TeX

• LaTeX was not the only set of extensions to TeX.
• AMS-TeX was a collection of extensions to TeX
  with more advanced mathematical typesetting
  features.
• Now LaTeX is by far the most popular. Most
  features from AMS-TeX have been absorbed.

7
Getting LaTeX

• It is free.
• It is on EECS instructional systems.
• It is on CSUA and OCF systems.
• It comes with all normal Linux distributions.
• For Windows try http//www.miktex.org/.

8
Writing LaTeX

• A sample document

\documentclassarticle \begindocument Hello,
world! \enddocument
9
What do you do with it?

• You turn LaTeX files into DVI files, with this
  command latex file.tex.
• The file extension should be tex.
• LaTeX will create a file called file.dvi.

10
DVI Files

• DVI files are what TeX creates by default.
• For display, type xdvi file.dvi at the prompt (in
  X).
• On Windows, read the manual.
• For printing, turn them into Postscript files
  with dvips file.dvi -o
• Then print the Postscript file file.ps as you
  would any Postscript file.
• If you omit the -o, dvips will have some default
  behavior which might be to print the file and
  might be to produce a ps file, depending on how
  its set up.

11
Creating PDF files

• To create PDF files, type pdflatex file.tex
• The program is basically the same as latex,
  except it produces a file.pdf PDF file.

12
Problems

• Often LaTeX will fail with an error.
• If it has a question mark for you, type x and
  press enter.
• This will quit LaTeX.
• When LaTeX dies like this, it is almost always
  because you screwed up.

13
How to solve problems

• Look at the error LaTeX gave you.
• It will have a line number which will help you
  find the error.
• Common mistakes
• Mismatched \begin/\end blocks
• Mismatched /
• Mismatched , , or \(\) or \\
• Misspelled keywords
• Sometimes lines are too long. This isnt fatal
  but looks bad. LaTeX outputs a warning with a
  line number so you can fix it.