Using LaTeX

Using LaTeX
Last Revision: May, 2007
( McCann )
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 beyond the capabilities of common word processing applications.

LaTeX Resources

Sample LaTeX Files:
- Local: I've created a short .tex file named shell.tex that demonstrates a few of the basics. Instructions for typesetting the document 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: There are several samples available on the net if you'd like to see how other people construct their LaTeX source files. Here's one that that mixes the .tex and the output for easy comparison.
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 minutes. I'm not sure why; maybe people read more slowly today...
  - The web pages of the TeX Users Group (TUG) have lots of TeX-related information.
  - Some of the many TeX and LaTeX tutorials: Getting to Grips with Latex, Getting Started with LaTeX, and Online tutorials on LaTeX.
- Books:
  - Rather than list a bunch, here's TUG's page titled Books about TeX and Friends. I'm fond of my third edition copy of Kopka and Daly's book, but then I haven't looked at any more recent books.
Installations:
- Windows
  - TUG recommends proTeXt for Windows users. I haven't used it, but I did once use MiKTeX, upon which proTeXt is based, and was happy with it.
- UNIX / Linux / Mac OS
  - 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.
  - Members of TUG receive copies of TeX Live, but anyone can download it and burn their own copy.

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