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Where Can I find Sources for Learning LaTex?
the_2nd_coming asks: "I am currently in college and I am majoring in math and computer science. Writing papers in Word and OpenOffice, while not a pain, is slow work due to formating. I have learned that LaTex is used for writing Math and Science papers a lot and once learned makes writing papers quick. I have found few good comprehensive resources on the web, and few books in the book stores. I was amazed that O'Reilly did not even have a book on it. What good sources are there that can teach me LaTex for Mathematics and BibTex?"
The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.
Unless you feel you need the full, raw power of LaTeX, I would recommend using Lyx. It is a 'what-you-see-is-what-you-mean' graphic editor for LaTeX. I used it all through college for writing electrical engineering lab reports, and it was many time easier to use than Word. The result was so beautiful it even blew away my professors. And that was a few years ago, so it is probably even better now.
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"For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain." - Phil. 1:21 (KJV)
I was amazed that O'Reilly did not even have a book on it.
That's because the definitive text, by LaTeX author Leslie Lamport, was published in 1986 by Addison-Wesley two years before O'Reilly got into the publishing business. Nobody's seen a need to improve on it I guess. Interestingly enough, Leslie Lamport works at Microsoft now, so I would assume if he published any new books on LaTeX they'd be Microsoft Press.
Once you get into more advanced usages, The LaTeX Companion is a good second book to pick up.
I don't know if you would want to use a GUI but LyX is a great editor that exports to LaTeX, and supports alot of features. In this way you can quickly see lots of the functions that are available to you, and then export to LaTeX to see how to do them.
I find it particularlly useful for the math formulas.
The Latex and Tex sites have tons of Documentation, even to the specific codes for the symbols...and Donald Knuth, the guy who invented Tex, has written a few books, check out his site, and ask any one of your professors how they learned it, they probably have to use it all of the time.
Travis
You can search: latex math
And you get this: LaTeX: Math into LaTeX Short Course
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.
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 .
Other people have mentioned Lamport's book; I thought I'd put in a word for "A Guide to LaTeX" by Helmut Kopka and Patrick W. Daly, Addison-Wesley, 1999 (looks like there's also a 2003 edition). I think this book succeeds in the very difficult task of being both a reference and a read-through text. I've successfully used it to write a thesis, a few publications and quite a few homeworks.
Here
you can find a very good short guide to LaTeX. It is not comprehensive, but it can get you started fast, and contains all the basic to intermediate material you need to typeset technical documents. It is used widely at my university.
It is really simple to use in documents/spreadsheets/etc., it has a speedbump sized learning curve, it's WYSIWYG, and you've already got it.
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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.)
I've just gone through the same process of learning LaTeX. However, I'm an OS X user and I found Mac-Tex at Penn State to be a very good resource. I chose TexShop for my front end iInstaller to install the LaTeX backend. You can also use Fink to install your backend but I didn't feel like comand line install this time as suggested previously.
Other than getting the software installed, I simply used Google for tutorials on LaTeX and BibTex.
I took 150 pages of Word documentation, exported it as text. In less then 2 days (most of which was spent proofing the document, and pulling out the graphics, diagrams and screenshots), I had the document fully sourced in Latex. I setup macros for various things. The headers, footers I wrote custom cut macros to size for it. I wrote three or four different types of list customizations (instructions, feature lists, outlines, and possible something else).
I write about a dozen different macros most of which ended up being bold or italics for each different type of item. Then I read the document, as I came across things, I used the macro to define what they were. \button{OK}, \windowTitle{Main Screen}, stuff like that.
I customized a wrap-around package for the graphics.
Then when I wanted something to change, I changed the macro, and everything was fixed. No searching the document to find them all. I just setup a .cls file (a Class/Style file), and that was it. Then I just typed. Everything looked exact. Everything looked consistant. Everything was a single render away from finishing. Version of the doucment could be "diff'ed" using standard text tools. I could integrate the changes from a half dozen people with relative ease.
If you are fiddling around with things a bunch, you should have just written a document style, and let Latex handle all of the spacing for you. If you are fiddling with the layout of your document all the time, you are doing it wrong. Stop applying asethetics to it. It's just a document, not a work of art. Drag the style file that has every technique you've ever used around with you. Comment them in and out as you need them.
Consistancy looks better then perfection to me at least. I suppose I could see fiddling with the inter-spacing of mathematical formulas, and possible a bit of tinkering with table column sizes. However, most of that is quick and easy relative to doing it in Word/WordPerfect/Office. In my experince resizing anything in an Office document that is 300 pages long is a good way to crash office, run your machine out of memory, and really be frustrated.
The beauty of Latex is that you setup a style guide, and then just type your document. It's over. Maybe you include a handful of images. Layout a style for each different type of object you want to use, and then just use the macros for those objects. That's all you ever have to do. Fiddling with sizing, spacing, and control is over. Along with the fact, that Latex has far better control in my experience then any other Word Processing system I've ever used.
Kirby
I'm honor bound to put in a plug for George Gratzer's Math into LaTeX , which is the only book I'm aware of that covers most of the intricacies of AMS LaTeX. If you have a lot of math to write, George's book will probably tell you what you need to type (and will also probably have an example that's pretty close to what you need).
MiL also has a nice introduction to LaTeX, walking you through creating your very first LaTeX article; covers BibTeX reasonably thoroughly; and introduces you to some of the additional minutiae you should be aware of when writing a book with LaTeX.
ObAdditionalHonorableMention: I edited Math into LaTeX, but I don't see a cent from sales. I do use the book all the time when I'm trying to figure out something new or remember how to do something I haven't done for a while.
LaTeX comes with a whole suite of useful goodies, but there are some other really useful utilities you'll probably want to figure out. first is ispell (or aspell, haven't tried it), which is an interactive spell checker which (with the right cmdline switches) groks TeX (and thus LaTeX). next up is make, once your sources become fairly complicated (which for me means n >= 1 files usuall), a makefile becomes a real friend -- this way all your indices, glossaries, etc. are automagically regenerated as necessary, bibtex gets rerun as necesssary, etc. and (pdf)latex gets run until all crossreferences are resolved, if you have the right magic in your makefile.
what else... oh yeah, a couple word of advice: i'm a big fan of the amsmath and amssym packages (so math actually looks the way you expect it to). hyperref is nice if you want live links in your docs (so bibliography citations are linked to the bibliography entries, for example). i believe hyperref also lets you put in urls. there's a little weirdness in getting LaTeX to actually use an 8.5" x 11" page with 1" margins (it's fairly non-obvious). drop me a message and i'll show you the preamble that fixes this.
if you're going to be spending a lot of time writing up algorithms, a package like alg (or newalg) is pretty nice. i don't remember the specifics of its usage off hand, but if you check your handy dandy local ctan mirror (http://ctan.org), they'll have docs (+ sources) for all these packages and a ton more. there is a package which will even allow you to include C/C++/Java/Pascal/etc. code into your docs and pretty print that too (again, i forget which package, but i can check for you).
hope this helps.
That's not an error. It's a warning, and an insignificant one at that. It says that the degree of stretching LaTeX had to do to fully-justify that line was more than LaTeX's tastes appreciated. LaTeX is telling you that if you wanted to be anal about it, you could try to rearrange your text to make it look prettier. Word wouldn't even do that -- you'd never know.