Slashdot Mirror

• Windows users: MiKTeX
• Mac Users: TeXShop
• General: Emacs w/ AucTeX
• There are many others, Google is your friend.

MathType is a great tool to convert all of your word equations to latex as well. If you start from scratch, they have a free editor to create latex equations.

Yes, it does! I tried MS-Word, OO.org and xmlresume before switching back to good old LaTeX and the excellent res class.

dont' waste your money on a book. check google. a couple starting points are [in pdf]:
The Not So Short Guide to LaTeX2e
The Comprehensive LaTeX Symbol List

Unless you are looking to do seriously advanced things (and even if you are), LaTex and BibTeX are things that can be learned very easily from online resources. Spending money on a book is totally wasteful. Just google for keywords relating to what you are trying to do (and include the word "latex" in your search). Also look around for .tex files people have posted--these can be very useful as well.

dont' waste your money on a book. check google. a couple starting points are [in pdf]:
The Not So Short Guide to LaTeX2e
The Comprehensive LaTeX Symbol List

Unless you are looking to do seriously advanced things (and even if you are), LaTex and BibTeX are things that can be learned very easily from online resources. Spending money on a book is totally wasteful. Just google for keywords relating to what you are trying to do (and include the word "latex" in your search). Also look around for .tex files people have posted--these can be very useful as well.

There's a document named Latex for Word Processor Users which I found incredibly helpful when I picked up LaTeX after a few years slack. It's structured according to the menus in a most word processors, which makes it easy to find the information you're looking for.

--Bud

I have been using LaTex since forever .. written my Physics thesis in it and still use it for writing letters and stuff. It is just simpler since I have all my templates set up and dont need to worry about layouting at all anymore.

I have found that it is essential to have a good IDE (powerful editor). The ones I can recommend are either Vim or Emacs with the respective addons if you are already familiar with either of those editor or otherwise make sure you check out Kile (http://kile.sourceforge.net/)if you run KDE (or anyhting else Linux that allows you to run KDE apps .. or even Cygwin) or under windows you have to check out WinEDT (http://www.winedt.com/ ).

And then of course the best resource for anything TeX is the CTAN network (CTAN: the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network http://www.ctan.org/). Lots of very useful stuff there.

I started with Lyx, which is quite good in itself. It can export to LaTeX. If you're completely new, you can start with writing a small document in Lyx, export it, and continue from there. Then you should see how the basic stuff works. Or you can use LaTeX commands in Lyx. After I went over to using LaTeX, Lyx has still been able to import my documents.

There are lots of free documentation as well. The not so short introduction to LaTeX2E is a very good introduction. If you use some kind of *nix, you should install the documentation that comes with your LaTeX distribution. At least TeTeX comes with a nice browsable help system: texdoctk. You probably have more documentation than you thought you had.

BibTeX is complicated. You should learn about it before you are halfway through your thesis, because there are lots of options and styles, and the styles take different options. BibTeX Tutorial is a bit helpful, but it doesn't tell you everything you want to know. There are many different citation styles -- natbib and jurabib are the only ones I've looked at. The former lets you choose between author-year and numerical citation styles, whereas the latter is based on footnotes. You probably want natbib in mathematics (but I'm not sure!).

LaTeX is actually quite easy to use, but you'll need an editor you can use with it, and one that you're comfortable with. Most people prefer Emacs, for some silly reason. It might have something to do with the fact that you can run the whole environment from within the editor. But don't be fooled! Vim is still the best editor out there! *ducks*

(More seriously: you can use any editor that will let you write plain ASCII text. If you prefer vim to Emacs, you can use that. But Emacs has loads of good LaTeX modes. I think AucTex is preferred among those who use it.)

Now, seriously, back in the day when I learned LaTeX, the best sources were my friends, and the book The not so Short Introduction to LaTeX .

Start at the LaTeX project site.

Go buy Leslie Lamport's "LaTeX: A Document Preparation System" book.

Take a look at the Indian TeX Users Group's LaTeX tutorial.

Then read Tobias Oetiker's "The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX 2e"

If you need a quick start then start using Lyx and their Tips and Tricks section.

TeX is BCP for everyone writing math papers.

Another poster has answered this below..

Is this true? (Hopefully using the right term...I mean itemized lists with roman numerials, numbers, letters for each part)

If you mean "itemized" or "enumerated" lists then yes there is a limit it appears you can go 5 deep.

The following will give a "Too deeply nested" error. Due to the "sub sub sub sub sub sub item"

N.B. It it not very pretty due to having to get past the "comment compression filter"...

\documentclass{article} \begin{document} \begin{itemize} \item Item \begin{itemize} \item Sub item \begin{itemize} \item Sub sub item \begin{itemize} \item sub sub sub item \begin{itemize} \item sub sub sub sub item \begin{itemize} \item sub sub sub sub sub item \end{itemize} \end{itemize} \end{itemize} \end{itemize} \end{itemize} \end{itemize} \end{document}

As with many aspects of LaTeX however if you find it doesn't do something it probably means it's not prudent (from a structural perspective) to do it anyway. For example if you really need that level of deep reference you may well be better off with part,chapter,section, subsection, ... . . .,itemize etc... Ironically I tried posting this reply with some deep nesting, slashdot posts are limited to three levels deep! ;-) Of course if you wish to you can always override the builtins with your own "super list" or something.

Also, can ya'll post some good links to a newbie learning LaTex..and some good reference sites that have all the tags layed out with good explanations?

Sure, below are a list places I would reccomend starting, you havn't said if you use Windows, *nix or Mac so i've added both (sorry if you are a Mac man you'll have to Google yourself).

• Editing:
• • *nix If you are a *nix user I would reccomend the following editing combination.
  • XEmacs
  • AucTeX. A sophisticated editing mode for LaTeX
  • preview-latex. Places the rendered equations and images directly in the editor window making "equation tuning" and other tasks a snip.
• Windows
• • WinEdt. A very sophisticated text editor for Windows. Its forte is LaTeX. It is not free, but well worth the money.

• Learning resources:
• • Getting started
  • Good overview
  • A list of symbols
  • The not so short introduction to LaTeX2e
  • Tips and tricks
  • BibTeX help.

• Other random stuff
• • dvipdfm. For converting the output of LaTeX into PDF (highly recommended)
  • Prof. Knuth's home page(The author of TeX).
  • CTANThe Comprehensive TeX Archive Network. Here you will be able to download packages, utilities and tools that do not come by default in your LaTeX distribution.

-ed

• It's "LaTeX" (their formatting).
• Get it here.

• Text Processing using LaTeX
• Help on LaTeX
• The Comprehensive LaTeX Symbol List

To add to that, LaTeX does have changebar support:

LaTeX Changebars

It even comes with a script to diff two LaTeX documents and add the changebars for you. ASCII wins again!

I think that has always been the MS line. Sometimes it is stated as: ``You folks here at _____ can't possibly justify the expense of developing what our [lying] salesmen [wrongly] claim that we can provide.''

Some of the best minds in the world have been working on open source and libre software [1] since before MS first stole time on a university mainframe. They've always worked to make systems which filled their needs, and so open source and libre software has always been aimed at what we used to call power users. It has been hard to learn, easy to use, and powerful.

MS has succeeded in large part because of their marketing efforts. Opensource/libre has succeeded as far as it has because of technical merit. Now we see some marketing being applied to these same systems which were making it on their technical merits. Redhat, Mandrake, and now Debian desktop are all making libre software accessible to the clueless. FUD seems to be loosing its effect. MS is starting to panic. Hence, we see this sort of ill-thought-out nonsense from the salesmen.

1. Think of Knuth and TeX, or Fateman, Schelter, et al and Macsyma/Maxima.

Basix

I've set the "Normal" stylesheet to 10 point Courier on 24 pt leading and turned off all the toolbars . . . The only reason I'm using Word is because you can import a styled Word document into InDesign and let InDesign's stylesheet override the formatting in the Word document.

Have you considered LaTeX? It lets you write your docs in a simple text editor (which is pretty much what you've turned Word into) and then apply the correct formatting, pagination, endnotes, citations, fonts, figures, and layout later.

It works great in Mac OS X, and has a few good Mac OS-native frontends. It produces PS or PDF, and doesn't cost a dime! The markup language takes a little getting used to, but there are some excellent books available, or you can use a WYSIWYG front-end.

If you write scientific papers, you should be using LaTeX. Get the style file for the journals you submit to, and your paper will be formatted to suit them.

The combination of emacs, auctex, reftex, aspell and latex works together seamlessly to provide far nicer output than MS-anything, for less effort. Reftex in particular makes these references trivial to keep straight. They're all on your Linux installation disks right now.

I have no idea whether OpenOffice suffers similar flaws. Perhaps I'll get ambitious enough to run some of these tests on it myself, someday. In the mean time, I do my number crunching in R. I find that LaTeX provides far more professional-looking reports than any combination of MS products.

... is the only truly well-commented code. Literate programming was invented by Knuth. If you don't know who Knuth is: he's the author of the definitive CS work called "The Art of Computer Programming". Ask any of your friends who actually studied computer science about it.

Knuth wrote more than books. For example, he wrote the typesetting program, TeX which is to this very day the most popular way academics in the CS field employ to write their papers (especially using a macro package called LaTex). He just wasn't satisfied with the available ways to write mathematical books at the time (early 80s). He had a good reason - you can see the difference in quality between it and anything else - especially Word (Ugh).

To ensure you'll have the right idea about the quality of his work, note he's actually sending people checks when they find a bug in his books or his code. Of course people tend to frame them rather than cache them :-). Also note that nobody has managed to obtain such a check for a long time.

So, what is literate programming anyway? Instead of inventing yet another definition, here's a pretty good definition which you can find in the site, together with many others:

Marc van Leeuwen. "Requirements for Literate Programming" in CWEBx Manual, pg. 3-4.

The basic idea of literate programming is to take a fundamentally different starting point for the presentation of programs to human readers, without any direct effect on the program as seen by the computer. Rather than to present the program in the form in which it will be compiled (or executed), and to intercalate comments to help humans understand what is going on (and which the compiler will kindly ignore), the presentation focuses on explaining to humans the design and construction of the program, while pieces of actual program code are inserted to make the description precise and to tell the computer what it should do. The program description should describe parts of the algorithm as they occur in the design process, rather than in the completed program text. For reasons of maintainability it is essential however that the program description defines the actual program text; if this were defined in a separate source document, then inconsistencies would be almost impossible to prevent. If programs are written in a way that concentrates on explaining their design to human readers, then they can be considered as works of (technical) literature; it is for this reason that Knuth has named this style of software construction and description "literate programming".

Does it work in practice? All I can say is that I have used it in a real-world project with great success. The main downsides to it, and this applies to any type of documentation, is that it takes up-front time (even if it does save time later), and that you need to employ people with some measure of writing ability. It is surprising how many people can code well, but are hard-pressed to write coherent, readable description of their code. Especially if you write your documentation in English and the programmer's native language is Hebrew or Russian :-(

Oh, and it also is hard to do in IDEs like Visual Studio. And you won't learn about it in your university, never mind your VB in 3 days course. Just like design by contract and many other techniques, the problem isn't that humanity doesn't know how to write software well - it is that humanity doesn't want to.

My girlfriend is a ubergeek who plays the Nintendo a hell of a lot more than I do (I participate in two player games... where she proceeds to whoop my white ass). She does Linux admin, codes C in circles around my head, is a LaTeX Goddess (follow the link you sickos), and has had every Nintendo game system since NES. Now, you tell me who the Gamecube was for. :)

I've just been looking at the curve document class for LaTeX and it seems to be very well suited for what you want to do. You can grab it from CTAN.

It's a great program.

you can download it here

I've made some beautifull posters with it. All you need is scissors and tape. It even prints allignment crop marks for you.

Warning! I have had trouble using it on level 2 PS. Level 1 works fine though.

There are LaTeX processors for most platforms. A quick Google search can be rather useful.

As for viewing LaTeX files, you can convert them to many popular formats - HTML, postscript, PDF, RTF, DOC... - or use a browser plugin. IBM's TechExplorer (http://www.software.ibm.com/network/techexplorer/ ) allows you to view TeX, LaTeX and MathML documents in IE or Netscape.

LaTeX is much more flexible than any other format I've tried so far. It can do books, articles, reports, and slides - and these are all standard packages. The Comprehensive TeX Archive Network is to LaTeX as CPAN is to Perl - an immensely useful repository of cool stuff. =)

It's not too hard to learn, either. You can pick up the Not-So Short Guide to LaTeX (http://wso.williams.edu/how/lshort2e) or any of the other tutorials on the Net.

LaTeX is beautiful. I haven't had to use anything else for my papers ever since I discovered the joys of LaTeX. <g>

One way to do this would be to say that anyone can make changes to the code and whatever, but they cannot distribute alternate versions of the code under the name of your program --

Methinks St Donald had the same idea :

% This program is copyright (C) 1982 by D. E. Knuth; all rights are reserved.
% Copying of this file is authorized only if (1) you are D. E. Knuth, or if
% (2) you make absolutely no changes to your copy. (...)

If this program is changed, the resulting system should not be called
`\TeX'; the official name `\TeX' by itself is reserved
for software systems that are fully compatible with each other.

Just shows you you need to check CTAN more often ;-)

---

2-3 years ago, I was facing this difficult choice for writing my thesis: LyX wasn't quite there yet, staroffice (still from stardiv at the time) looked good but wasn't quite there yet either, and everybody else in the lab (99.9% of the people) were complaining about all kinds of problems in office97, or from migration to one system to another (one guy managed to go nearly all the way through from 2 to 2000, but it took him a lot longer than anybody else to get his PhD ;)...

WYSIWIG is great for short documents... something you manage to write in a few minutes and can still handle the layout of.

Anything bigger than a few pages, a few dozens of cross-references to sections, equations, figures, citations and word pukes. It doesn't do it straight away, though... but slowly at first and giving-up more and more errors as the document grows.
Then when you want to print to another printer that isn't the one you wrote your document for, the layout and page breaks go all over the place. This Isn't Normal.

I remember having had this discussion on /. at the time and several people advised me to move to LaTeX.

Sure I was shit scared to do anything the size of a thesis in TeX... need to compiling documents before you can see them, limited xdvi viewer, no spell checker... all in all LaTeX isn't very appealing for the new user.

But think about it this way: A 200page document is quite a big project. If it were a big programming project, would you rather rely on a limited point and click tool somebody who doesn't understand shit about the stuff you're really doing, or would you rather do it yourself with a powerful language like c, c++... insert your favorite language here.

There you go! and you don't expect the learning curve to be easy either, do you?

So yes, it was quite a difficult move for me, but fortunately, there are good documents on the net... just grab a copy of epslatex.pdf from a CTAN mirror and The not so short introduction to LaTeX 2e.

The most amazing thing about LaTeX is very simple: It's Open. This means that any part of your document, you can generate yourself from your programs. Need to generate a table with figures? just do it.

The same thing goes to two other programs I extensively used: grace and xfig. Yes they have somewhat limited interfaces, but you can generate the data from your own programs, so who cares about the interface?! they have open and well documented formats, it's the only thing that should matter.

For spell checking, I used aspell, again, who cares about real-time error correcting when you can do it in one go near the end?

For the editor, I don't know what you usually use, I use vi (improved :) and it works great. Use whatever you want.

Okay, I probably should stop being a LaTeX zealot, just think about it. Okay, you wouldn't start writing c++ code to just rename a few files... that's why bash is here for. The same way, to quickly produce a dirty document, wysiwyg is handy... but anything bigger than a few lines of code and you'll start to feel limited if you stay in bash instead of going for c/c++... same with documents... And when the program you're using is Trully Open, then you don't depend on The Big Corps who don't give a shit about you, just your money...

---

2-3 years ago, I was facing this difficult choice for writing my thesis: LyX wasn't quite there yet, staroffice (still from stardiv at the time) looked good but wasn't quite there yet either, and everybody else in the lab (99.9% of the people) were complaining about all kinds of problems in office97, or from migration to one system to another (one guy managed to go nearly all the way through from 2 to 2000, but it took him a lot longer than anybody else to get his PhD ;)...

WYSIWIG is great for short documents... something you manage to write in a few minutes and can still handle the layout of.

Anything bigger than a few pages, a few dozens of cross-references to sections, equations, figures, citations and word pukes. It doesn't do it straight away, though... but slowly at first and giving-up more and more errors as the document grows.
Then when you want to print to another printer that isn't the one you wrote your document for, the layout and page breaks go all over the place. This Isn't Normal.

I remember having had this discussion on /. at the time and several people advised me to move to LaTeX.

Sure I was shit scared to do anything the size of a thesis in TeX... need to compiling documents before you can see them, limited xdvi viewer, no spell checker... all in all LaTeX isn't very appealing for the new user.

But think about it this way: A 200page document is quite a big project. If it were a big programming project, would you rather rely on a limited point and click tool somebody who doesn't understand shit about the stuff you're really doing, or would you rather do it yourself with a powerful language like c, c++... insert your favorite language here.

There you go! and you don't expect the learning curve to be easy either, do you?

So yes, it was quite a difficult move for me, but fortunately, there are good documents on the net... just grab a copy of epslatex.pdf from a CTAN mirror and The not so short introduction to LaTeX 2e.

The most amazing thing about LaTeX is very simple: It's Open. This means that any part of your document, you can generate yourself from your programs. Need to generate a table with figures? just do it.

The same thing goes to two other programs I extensively used: grace and xfig. Yes they have somewhat limited interfaces, but you can generate the data from your own programs, so who cares about the interface?! they have open and well documented formats, it's the only thing that should matter.

For spell checking, I used aspell, again, who cares about real-time error correcting when you can do it in one go near the end?

For the editor, I don't know what you usually use, I use vi (improved :) and it works great. Use whatever you want.

Okay, I probably should stop being a LaTeX zealot, just think about it. Okay, you wouldn't start writing c++ code to just rename a few files... that's why bash is here for. The same way, to quickly produce a dirty document, wysiwyg is handy... but anything bigger than a few lines of code and you'll start to feel limited if you stay in bash instead of going for c/c++... same with documents... And when the program you're using is Trully Open, then you don't depend on The Big Corps who don't give a shit about you, just your money...

---

2-3 years ago, I was facing this difficult choice for writing my thesis: LyX wasn't quite there yet, staroffice (still from stardiv at the time) looked good but wasn't quite there yet either, and everybody else in the lab (99.9% of the people) were complaining about all kinds of problems in office97, or from migration to one system to another (one guy managed to go nearly all the way through from 2 to 2000, but it took him a lot longer than anybody else to get his PhD ;)...

WYSIWIG is great for short documents... something you manage to write in a few minutes and can still handle the layout of.

Anything bigger than a few pages, a few dozens of cross-references to sections, equations, figures, citations and word pukes. It doesn't do it straight away, though... but slowly at first and giving-up more and more errors as the document grows.
Then when you want to print to another printer that isn't the one you wrote your document for, the layout and page breaks go all over the place. This Isn't Normal.

I remember having had this discussion on /. at the time and several people advised me to move to LaTeX.

Sure I was shit scared to do anything the size of a thesis in TeX... need to compiling documents before you can see them, limited xdvi viewer, no spell checker... all in all LaTeX isn't very appealing for the new user.

But think about it this way: A 200page document is quite a big project. If it were a big programming project, would you rather rely on a limited point and click tool somebody who doesn't understand shit about the stuff you're really doing, or would you rather do it yourself with a powerful language like c, c++... insert your favorite language here.

There you go! and you don't expect the learning curve to be easy either, do you?

So yes, it was quite a difficult move for me, but fortunately, there are good documents on the net... just grab a copy of epslatex.pdf from a CTAN mirror and The not so short introduction to LaTeX 2e.

The most amazing thing about LaTeX is very simple: It's Open. This means that any part of your document, you can generate yourself from your programs. Need to generate a table with figures? just do it.

The same thing goes to two other programs I extensively used: grace and xfig. Yes they have somewhat limited interfaces, but you can generate the data from your own programs, so who cares about the interface?! they have open and well documented formats, it's the only thing that should matter.

For spell checking, I used aspell, again, who cares about real-time error correcting when you can do it in one go near the end?

For the editor, I don't know what you usually use, I use vi (improved :) and it works great. Use whatever you want.

Okay, I probably should stop being a LaTeX zealot, just think about it. Okay, you wouldn't start writing c++ code to just rename a few files... that's why bash is here for. The same way, to quickly produce a dirty document, wysiwyg is handy... but anything bigger than a few lines of code and you'll start to feel limited if you stay in bash instead of going for c/c++... same with documents... And when the program you're using is Trully Open, then you don't depend on The Big Corps who don't give a shit about you, just your money...

---

In most (lame user install-it-all-with-rpm) versions I know of, the 'Not-So-Short-Guide' comes with the latex distribution... check texmf/doc...

Or you can try the CTAN-link

There is already a Basic Interpreter written in TeX; try CTAN.