Dror Baron: Getting started in Latex

Dror Baron: Getting started in latex

Several students, collaborators, and friends have asked me how to get started in Latex. Instead of repeating the emails, I hope to organize the tips in an easily accesible format below.

Latex is a very simple programming language, a bit similar to HTML. Latex is primarily used in the science and engineering community to write documents that contain lots of equations, but can be used for other purposes too.

Start with the introductory guide. Another alternative is to look into the Wiki-book.
As explained above, Latex is a sort of simple programming language, and in order to translate it to a PS or PDF file you need a sort of translation or compilation software. Some people will run Latex on their personal computer (PC). Others will run in in a Unix environment. In case you want to run it on your PC, and this is recommended in order to be independent from various external constraints, then a good software to use is called Miktex. This is an open source Latex compiler. You can read about Miktex here. You can download Miktex, but this is a pretty big download (hundreds of MB).
They say that practice makes perfect, and indeed it can help to write a few brief examples. In the future I may post examples of my own here with figures, citations, and so on. Alternately, I might add a link to a more mature website.
Once you become proficient, there are more serious manuals. The following internet resource includes links to several manuals; I personally have one the books by Goosens and co-authors.

An example of Latex in action (from my first conference paper in 1999) can be accessed via zip or tar.gz formats. Please note that this somewhat old example used "bibitem" entries in the Latex source. It is more sophisticated to use a "bibtex" file, which is a sort of repository of all the papers you have cited over the years. Then, each paper can cite entries within the bibtex file, and an extra "compilation phase" creates the bibitem entries into an appropriately arranged file. Additionally, using bibtex has the advantage that citations appear in any order (alphabetical, chronological, etc.) that is appropriate for the publication being created. In the future I may add another Latex example that includes a bibtex file.

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