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Where Can I find Sources for Learning LaTex? 116

Posted by Cliff from the writing-papers-with-complex-equations dept.
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?"
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Where Can I find Sources for Learning LaTex? More

Where Can I find Sources for Learning LaTex?

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  • Learning LaTex (Score:5, Informative)

    by Giant Ape Skeleton ( 638834 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @04:28PM (#8976022) Homepage
    Right HERE. [amazon.com]


    • I also recommend the Kopka and Daly book listed below in the "people also shopped for..." section. It was the textbook for engineering students at my uni back in the day. Quite good.

      Also, the documentation directories in the standard TeTeX distribution are very helpful, once you learn the basics.

      Further, make bare bones template files of standard things (reports, letters)--and use them!

    • Re:Learning LaTex (Score:3, Informative)

      by portscan ( 140282 )
      dont' waste your money on a book. check google. a couple starting points are [in pdf]:
      The Not So Short Guide to LaTeX2e [ctan.org]
      The Comprehensive LaTeX Symbol List [ctan.org]

      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

  • Use Lyx, WYSIWYM Latex Interface (Score:5, Informative)

    by Ryan Kirkpatrick ( 45 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @04:28PM (#8976028) Homepage
    Unless you feel you need the full, raw power of LaTeX, I would recommend using Lyx [lyx.org]. 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.
    • LaTeX is the standard for science and particularly mathematics papers. If the_second_coming is really serious about a career in such, learning LaTeX sooner rather than later will serve them well. Of course, a search on Amazon would have saved a lot of banter on slashdot, but what do you want? Editors who actually filter things?
      • Here is a page chock full [amazon.com] on them with 100's of mini-reviews. It is amazing that slashdot sometimes seems like a google/amazon for the retarded.

        • Re:Use Lyx, WYSIWYM Latex Interface (Score:4, Interesting)

          by lars-o-matic ( 533381 ) <lars&middletonia,ca> on Monday April 26, 2004 @06:37PM (#8977563) Homepage
          It is amazing that slashdot sometimes seems like a google/amazon for the retarded.

          That's harsh, linzeal. Should the asker browse 100's of mini-reviews by any old posters and order books for $$$ on that basis alone?

          Asking /. readers for opinions and reading highest-moderated posts seems like a sensible way to qualify the list.

          • Amazon reviews are rated as well, and they are not merely persistent but consistent with new knowledge. If someone wanted to comment on this article in a month they would be sol. Slashdot is nice and all for extremely fresh topical matters but as a book review site I'll stick with places that have served me more consistently.
          • I have found few good comprehensive resources on the web

            Obviously the words of someone who didn't look very hard. Why would you expect them to have actually looked at Amazon?

          • Should the asker browse 100's of mini-reviews by any old posters and order books for $$$ on that basis alone?

            No, they should use Google- just like those of us with a brain do. When I type in the two keywords- latex tutorial - into Google, *every* link on the first page is topical. LaTeX tutorials- huh, who knew? If I was on a platform where I didn't know how to grab the LaTeX distro- that is, if it wasn't something like apt-get install latex - I would then ask google about latex and get a link to an i
        • It is amazing that slashdot sometimes seems like a google/amazon for the retarded.

          Not only is that statement funny, it's often true.

          LaTeX is one area of interest for folks for which there are a ton of good books and a veritable cornicopia of stuff to read online. I am no LaTeX guru, but it is what I use for writing papers these days- straight code, no Lyx. A two second search on google yields many sites, and I got my start from one of the first few listed. I then took a leap of intelligence and google
    • And there is a native port for Windows (since you use Word): http://www.home.zonnet.nl/rareitsma/lyx/
      It's much easier to set up than the other port (with Cygwin).

    • Re:Use Lyx, WYSIWYM Latex Interface (Score:4, Insightful)

      by MS_is_the_best ( 126922 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @06:01PM (#8977160)
      Lyx is rather good. However, since almost all comments at this moment seem to point in Lyx' direction I want to give a bit of counterargument.

      Lyx is not very easy to use in conjunction with plain source editting. It uses its own tags and seems to handle some things slightly different than you would do yourself. In this sense you can compare it to Dreamweaver for HTML. When only using dreamweaver it is sort of OK, but if you want hybrid editing and use more advanced things (only style sheet layout for example), the WYSIWYG becomes more and more frustating as it edits your carefully crafted source.

      Espacially if you use a lot of custom commands and advanced positioning system, lyx is NOT the way to go. I use rather advanced and hacked sty files for letters, advanced reports and PDF-presentations and lyx cannot deal with these files properly.

      So stuck with lyx only if your needs are not to advanced and you have no interest in editting the source by yourself.

      On a side note, the best way to learn latex is read the sty and cls files, which often come bundled with your tex distribution. I learned a lot from them (also how NOT to do it..). For example the Seminar files and examples contain a lot of interesting material.

      This, again, is beyond the basics, but they are to easy... (\begin{bla} \end{bla} is al you need, where bla is section, enumerate etc. (all logical keywords, only the manual is needed)).
    • There's also Texmacs [texmacs.org], which I prefer. It's got, IMO, better mathematics support. Plus it uses the TeX fonts throught so it looks gorgeous on screen.

      Texmacs has a built-in renderer if you don't want to run stuff through LaTeX. It's got links to computer algebra systems --- never used it as I don't do maths any more, but it sounds suspiciously like a Mathematica Light built in to your word processor... and there's even a Windows version.

  • Go to the source (Score:5, Informative)

    by ivan256 ( 17499 ) * on Monday April 26, 2004 @04:28PM (#8976032)
    I was amazed that O'Reilly did not even have a book on it.

    That's because the definitive text [bookpool.com], 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 [bookpool.com] is a good second book to pick up.

    • Re:Go to the source (Score:3, Informative)

      by jhealy1024 ( 234388 )
      The definitive text is excellent, though a tad dated. There are a few other books that do a good job of explaining (La)TeX.

      I highly recommend "A Guide to LaTeX" by Kopka and Daly. It's extremely user-friendly, especially for the beginner. The book gave me enough to write my CS thesis (including figures, citations, and drawings), even though I had no prior knowledge of LaTeX.

      Even after you've learned the basics, it makes a handy reference when you can't quite remember how to do something. I've been usi

    • Once you get into more advanced usages, The LaTeX Companion is a good second book to pick up.

      Be sure to get the new, second edition, due out at the end of the month and not the older edition, which is now about ten years old and definitely showing its age. (Parent links to the new edition.)

      Now that The LaTeX Companion is being updated, can BibTeX 1.0 be far behind?! :)

    • Interestingly enough, Leslie Lamport works at Microsoft now Then following standard Microsoft ways shouldn't a new version come out every year thats progressively worse.

  • LyX (Score:2, Informative)

    by I_Love_Pocky! ( 751171 )
    I don't know if you would want to use a GUI but LyX [lyx.org] 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.

  • Look at sources... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by phraktyl ( 92649 ) * <wyattNO@SPAMdraggoo.com> on Monday April 26, 2004 @04:33PM (#8976096) Homepage Journal
    The way I learned the most about LaTeX was by looking at the sources of all of the documents that came with it. Look at the AMS documents, for example. You can find all kinds of LaTeX source documents on the web as well.

    Then start creating your own documents, and trying out things. Search on google or groups.google if you are getting errors---someone else has run into them before you.

    Good luck!
    • To expand upon this comment and one other posted before it. Use Lyx and view the source of the documents it creates. I haven't used it for a few years so I'm sure I've gotten rather rusty now, but that is how I learned to write LaTeX by hand.

  • Google is your friend (Score:2, Informative)

    by migarg ( 716984 )
    You can search: latex math [google.com]
    And you get this: LaTeX: Math into LaTeX Short Course [loria.fr]

  • LaTeX for Word Processor Users (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ResHippie ( 105522 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @04:34PM (#8976112)
    http://lark.cc.ukans.edu/~pauljohn/software/latex4 wp.pdf

    It's a great intro document that allows you to translate all of the habits you've picked up from Word/OOWriter in LaTeX commands. I don't write reports without it.

  • Well.... (Score:5, Informative)

    by fiori ( 45848 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @04:35PM (#8976120) Homepage

    Start at the LaTeX project site [latex-project.org].

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

    Take a look at the Indian TeX Users Group's LaTeX tutorial [cam.ac.uk].

    Then read Tobias Oetiker's "The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX 2e" [ctan.org]

    If you need a quick start then start using Lyx [lyx.org] and their Tips and Tricks [s-v-p.de] section.

    • I was going to post a link to the not so short guide. Its what I used to learn latex when I wrote my dissertation and found it very helpfull
  • If you think it's slow using a word-processor, Latex will make you feel like you have a clone who's only job is to figure stuff out while the rest of the world continues getting work done, oh, and you're the clone who doesn't get anything done while you figure Latex out.

    No, really...Latex has many advantages. If you are happy to let it pick all your formatting settings, then speed is one of them. Otherwise, if you need things formatted a certain way, it's a HUGE time-sink. I personally like more control

    • Re:If you think it's slow using a word-processor.. (Score:5, Informative)

      by ComputerSlicer23 ( 516509 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @05:40PM (#8976932)
      You're doing it wrong.... No I mean that, you're not using Latex to it's fullest.

      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

      • Well put. There are some gotchas which can make your layout funky (empty newlines in a big math contex eg) but those are few and far between. If you are trying to make LaTeX look like something it's not then most likely you are trying to make it look "wrong". That's my experience at any rate.

        And since it's a text document you can do a load of magic with it, just as you mention. Take a large document and break it into pieces and you can work on it concurrently. (Try that in any Word version or clone.) You c
        • Crap, I forgot the one biggest benefit I have encountered with LaTeX compared to eg Word. It doesn't completely fuck up references. Whenever I use references in a Word document I know that sooner or later it's going to get corrupt and I'll have to add them all again. It just seems like it can't properly handle that you move figures around and such.
        • Doing layout is rather easy with latex... In general if you re-use your design, f.e. develop something template based, like a montly magazine) latex is a perfect way to go (that is if you are a nerd implementing a designer's layout, latex seems too difficult for brain-dead designers). And it is very easilt coupled with dynamic data sources (multi-channeling etc.).

          But if you want to layout something only once, it is often faster too use a program meant for that, like Adobe Pagemaker/Indesign, Quark etc.. La
          • Oh I'm sure you can do it, but I think there is a rather big gap between the "small paper" which can use LaTeX/TeX since they have a really simple layout and the really big paper which has the kind of resources to make a fully automated system.

            My experience from doing Highschool papers / yearbook designs was that there was a pretty tight feedback from layout to writer. So every now and then a few words were added or removed to make columns line up better and stuff like that. Also the individual page design

        • If you are doing layout for a paper it may not help you much. That's note really what it's for though.

          Actually, you are incorrect IMHO. It is possible and even easy to do paper layouts in Latex. It's designed specifically do deal with it. Okay, Latex might not be, but Tex is. Read up on Donald Knuth. He's a very interesting guy. His Dad actually typeset things manually with an old, old, old school, put a single letter into a big box, put ink on it, press it down on paper, style printing press.

          TeX

        • Actualy TeX was written as part of the web2c documentation system, and Knuth's literate programming philosophy, so it's initial purpose was program Documentation; LaTeX is an environment for TeX that's a lot more human readable than raw TeX code.

          Often I find that using LaTeX is faster than a word processor, because with a WP the rendering has to occure concurently with every little change. In LaTeX it's an edit, compile, then render cycle so I wait until the are big enough to justify the compile.
      • Let me second the above comment: take something you've written in another application, and LaTeX it. Play with packages, figure out what you need to do. It's the best way to learn, and you can make things work the way you want them to. Learning the internals will be the best thing you can do---LyX is cool and all, but nothing beats knowing how to do it without WYSIWYG. The links already given here are great. LaTeX rocks; enjoy it! brwski

      • Stop applying aesthetics to it. It's just a document, not a work of art .... Consistency looks better than perfection.

        I was expecting a more robust defence of Latex, but must say have been disappointed by your assertion that aesthetics is less important than form. The point here isn't to let the tool decide how you should think or exposit, but to choose a tool that fits in to your needs and way of work. Or perhaps you intended to say that, but somehow, it was lost in that rambling against the GP's need t

        • Because the learning curve for Latex makes the learning for XHTML and CSS look like Malcolm X.
        • Latex is a wonderful tool. He's probably just unaware of how to change the defaults, about how to use the tool to make it look exactly the way he wants. If you are making each layout decision, and deciding differently everytime inside of a document, you're working on art, not a document. Documents are internally consistant as to their formatting. If you want the output to have random inconsistancies due to their asthetics, the tool you are looking for is GIMP or Photoshop. If you want a great looking d
          • Latex gives you pixel-level control? How? I beat my head into a pulp looking for such control...how do you place things in very specific places? What reference documents that?
          • My linking to that XHTML + CSS article seems to have caused some confusion here. For the record, I have no experience of either Latex or XHTML + CSS. I was only throwing options when I mentioned the later, not comparing both.

            My only grouse was that the poster I was responding to didn't comment on the grandparent's point that Latex, apparently, didn't allow layout placement, but instead went off on a rant on why such control is unnecessary.

        • You can't compare html and css with LaTeX. MathML is nowhere near being generally usable, and html is for web browsers, not printed material. Maybe the css style sheets for printed material will come along well enough one day, but nearly everything serious that has been published in the last decade that contains a substantial amount of math formulae was done in TeX. There just isn't a reasonable substitute out there.
    • Latex DOES have advantages, but it's still just SO limited in what it can be used for.

      For example, Latex would be perfect for generating pre-filled out forms on the web. You could generate a latex template of the form, and take values in a CGI program and dynamically merge the template and the data to produce a temporary latex document, then generate a PDF from it for the web user to download and print. Problem is, latex is a BEAR to get text placed in specific places and constrained to specific rectangl
      • Problem is, latex is a BEAR to get text placed in specific places and constrained to specific rectangle areas. I tried, but never did figure that out.

        Fine-grained control in LaTeX is possible via TeX (or even just using PostScript for the truly hard-core). Also, the whole point to LaTeX was to alleviate the burden of typesetting large documents by having the software do most of it automatically. The strength of LaTeX is literally just typing away, running the latex and dvips commands, and having a gorge
      • If you print ps output, and print out a pdf generated from that same ps, the paper representation looks different; the margins are different, where text appears is different.

        Be double-sure that all the tools have similar default settings. Is the PS to PDF converter assuming A4 instead of Letter or vice versa? These kind of things can lead to the inconsistency you mention. Otherwise, I have had extrememly good luck with the PS and PDF output from LaTeX.
        • I looked at Tex, and it didn't look as if you could print within a rectangle, which was placed in an arbitrary, but specified location, and wrap and/or trim within the rectangle area. Without that, data being merged into the form template has to be massaged through a script for it to appear properly on the form.

          I still use Latex for some things, but I really think there's a place in the world for something that's geared more towards people with the need for more, and easier, control over the formatting, b
          • I looked at Tex, and it didn't look as if you could print within a rectangle, which was placed in an arbitrary, but specified location, and wrap and/or trim within the rectangle area.

            I haven't used them, but it looks like LaTeX's concept of "boxes" might fit the bill.
            • Boxes, as far as I can tell, can't be placed anywhere arbitrarily...like everything else, it's located with the flow of text. You can change the justification, but that's it.

              At least, from what I could tell.

              If I'm wrong, suffice it to say that Google didn't turn me up any answers, and learning latex in its entirety, including the practice needed to completely understand it to place text boxes in specific locations, is out of the question. I spent 3 days fighting with latex just to generate and print an

  • A Guide to Latex (Score:3, Informative)

    by deepestblue ( 206649 ) <`slashdot' `at' `ksharanam.net'> on Monday April 26, 2004 @04:38PM (#8976173)
    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.
    • I have to agree. I checked out a bunch of TeX and LaTeX books, and this is the best one I've seen. That being said, TeX and LaTeX NEED a replacement. The biggest problems I have are the fact that there aren't enough syntax conventions. Sometimes you need an '=' sign after a command, sometimes you dont. Sometimes the [] optional parameters come after the {} required parameters, sometimes not. Also some of the command names are bizarre, its impossible to remember all the commands you need, because of a lack

    • I thought I'd put in a word for "A Guide to LaTeX" by Helmut Kopka and Patrick W. Daly, Addison-Wesley, 1999

      Now that brings back memories! I did my M.A.Sc. thesis with LaTeX, and this was my reference on the finer points of LaTeX. I did the diagrams with xfig. This was also my first non-trivial use of a digital camera, taking pictures of antenna feeds and radios and things.

      I do lots of documents with LaTeX. Still. I'd rather type first and worry about the formatting later. WYSIWYG processors almost gu

  • Not So Short Guide To LaTeX (Score:4, Informative)

    by Lomby ( 147071 ) <andrea&lombardoni,ch> on Monday April 26, 2004 @04:49PM (#8976297) Homepage
    Here [ee.ethz.ch]
    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.

  • Equation Editor? (Score:3, Informative)

    by sam_van ( 602963 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @04:51PM (#8976330) Homepage
    You mentioned using word. Have you considered using the equation editor plug-in that comes with MS Office? (Yeah, I know I'm cruising for an ass-kicking now...)

    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.

    • Re:Equation Editor? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by BinLadenMyHero ( 688544 ) <binladen@9[ ]ls.org ['hel' in gap]> on Monday April 26, 2004 @05:00PM (#8976431) Journal
      It (more or less) works if you want to add one or two equetions on a text.
      Now go write a math text, or any other math/tech-related text with lots of expressions, and have a glimpse of how hell can be.
      • The Equation editor is simply a cut down version of a program called Math Type, which I use, and it exports in gif and eps formats, lets you colour bits in, and the expression formatting looks great.
    • Ever written a large documents with lots of (multi-line) equations in it? It is very frustating. The equation editor (afer having installed, it is not default :-() crashes much too often and if it doesn't Word will crash itself. If it doesn't crash, everything will constantly be re-formatted over different pages.

      Besides, it costs a lot of time to enter a function (latex takes longer in the begin, but shorter if you are used to it). And replacing small parts in all equations in your document is a lot easier
    • The Word equation editor is very slow and painful to work with. I prefer Openoffice.org for editing documents with equations. It has a markup mode which is very easy to learn and the help system is great.

      It's no replacement for latex but at least you can spend your time writing equations instead of looking for the right button to click.

  • I started learning LaTeX some months ago (Score:5, Informative)

    by MrHanky ( 141717 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @04:52PM (#8976342) Homepage Journal
    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 [ctan.org] 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 [www.ntg.nl] 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.)
  • Try TeXmacs [texmacs.org]. It's WYSIWYG, it's fast as hell to use (lots of hotkeys and smart ideas like "is member of" is '< tab tab tab'), and it exports to LaTeX so you can figure out how to encode the LaTeX manually if you must.

    You can always use it for the mundane stuff and do the fancy stuff by hand later.

    Plus, it's not so ugly it makes you want to claw your own eyes out, unlike LyX.

  • Check out Hypertext Help with LaTeX [nasa.gov] if you need a quick, online reference. Not so great if you actually need to learn LaTeX from scratch, however.

  • info latex
  • Though the power of a good reference book and a few tutorials is not to be underestimated, LaTeX is readable enough that you'll learn a lot just by downloading other people's source, and modifying it for your own use. Once you've got the basic syntax, it should be simple for you to build on different documents and styles.

  • Mac OS X and LaTeX (Score:2, Informative)

    by flabbergast ( 620919 )
    I've just gone through the same process of learning LaTeX. However, I'm an OS X user and I found Mac-Tex [psu.edu] at Penn State to be a very good resource. I chose TexShop [uoregon.edu] for my front end iInstaller [www.rna.nl] to install the LaTeX backend. You can also use Fink [sourceforge.net] 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 used _LaTeX for Linux_ by Bernice Sacks Lipkin (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/03 8 7987088/qid=1083015560/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xg l14/103-9939465-0827818?v=glance&s=books&n=507846) and it's a good cookbook-y kind of approach to things. i'm now fluent enough in LaTeX that when i do need to look something up, google does a good job of finding what i'm looking for.

    btw, i started using LaTeX because )(*@#&* word wouldn't put pictures where i told it to /and/ properly crossr
    • I found it useful when pounding out a research paper that required footnoting / Works Cited. BibTex made handling the citing easy and working in vi is much more focusing then being bombarded with all the screen clutter of Word. Vim even has syntax coloring which gives you just enough color to be able to visualize your document.
      • my weapon of choice for this stuff is emacs (yes, yes, insert flame war about how superior ${EDITOR} is to emacs, etc. etc. etc. *yawn*). this is partly out of inertia (i started with pico, was taught just enough emacs to accomplish a project as an intern and have sworn by it since), but mostly because emacs and i understand each other well. when handling LaTeX docs, emacs just does the Right Thing (tm), at least for the way i work. hit tab, and you'll find the current line indented to where it should be (

  • The best way to learn LaTeX is to take and modify someone else's source code.

    For that reason, I have the source code for my thesis and an IEEE technical publication on my website here [michael-forman.com]. It should work with a vanilla LaTeX installation in both Linux and MacOS (just type "make preview"). In Windows you'll need to install MikTeX and TeXnicCenter.

    Michael. [michael-forman.com]
  • Hi!

    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.ne [sourceforge.net]

  • Lyx (Score:1)

    by oojah ( 113006 )
    Try Lyx, it's fantastic. A "What You See Is What You Mean" front end to Tex. If you don't want to use it for documents, you could at least use it to write examples and then export to tex.

    Versioning support and lots of yumminess.

    http://www.lyx.org

    Cheers,

    Roger
  • There's a document named Latex for Word Processor Users [ctan.org] 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

  • Math into LaTeX (Score:3, Informative)

    by SamHill ( 9044 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @07:07PM (#8977852)

    I'm honor bound to put in a plug for George Gratzer's Math into LaTeX [amazon.com], 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.

  • other tools you'll want to make friends with (Score:4, Informative)

    by blackcoot ( 124938 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @07:34PM (#8978050)
    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.

  • Alternatives (Score:2, Offtopic)

    by Tomble ( 579119 )
    There's a system named "Lout" that was created in the early 90's (after 8 years of research!!) that's sort of similar to TeX and LaTeX, but has some nice advantages. EG: It isn't designed around US-ASCII, it produces postscript directly (and uses PS fonts), it's very flexible and easy to configure and write macros for, it's abosultely tiny compared to TeX, etc etc.

    If you want to check it out, the creator wrote a free (GPL) implementation named "Basser" Lout (after his university IIRC), which comes with loa

  • Compiling and debugging code just isn't fun enough, so I like to compile and debug my word processing documents as well. Nothing's more fun that compiling your paper and embarking on an easter-egg hunt for errors like this:
    Underfull \hbox (badness 10000) detected at line 19
    Vive La Tex!

    • Mod parent down (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      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.
  • Whatever you do, please please don't use CM (Computer Modern) fonts. In all due respect for Knuth, what's the deal with that? And to Tex/LaTex writers: have you heard of customisations? or are you just happy somthing came out?

    You might have the best text layout program but what's the use when the results look like amost any book by Springer-Varlag.

    Blah blah blah, rant rant rant - I'm trying to ask whats the quickest way to use Times ... ;-)

  • has anyone tried writing math on a tablet pc?
  • I am surprised that no-one has mentioned TeXmacs [texmacs.org]. Brilliant and powerful. I use emacs for my LaTeX editing, but this is really cool and actively maintained.

  • To manage your BibTeX database, use Pybliographer [pybliographer.org]. It has a simple GUI [pybliographer.org], and it even integrates well with LyX. If both applications are running, just hit the Cite button in Pybliographer, and the cross-reference is inserted into your LyX document!

    My only criticism of Pybliographer is that it can be a little cumbersome to install, depending on what distro you are running, because it requires Python and a particular version of the GNU Recode library.

    My wife, who isn't much of a computer expert, wanted

  • When writing my dissertation and preparing presentation I got a lot of help from comp.text.tex. Use groups.google.com [slashdot.org] to search the many, many usenet postings over many, many years. Actual package developers and book authors will respond to your postings on issues such as hyperlinked pdf or any other issues. Apart from that, be sure to go to www.ctan.org [ctan.org] and check out the search page where they have "Widely Referenced Links" such as Short Math Guide for LaTeX and Using Imported Graphics in LaTeX2e. In
  • Kile [sourceforge.net], the KDE Integrated LaTeX Environment, is a pretty powerful LaTeX IDE for KDE. It has toolbars and menus that will be of major assistance, and has commands that automate certain things, like creating a skeletal structure for your document.

    Of course, you'll need more than that--an IDE can't teach you everything. I particularly like this LaTeX tutorial [maths.tcd.ie]--it was the first one I found when I first started learning LaTeX a little over a year ago, and it's pretty good for starting one off.

  • Until LyX 1.4 is released and has full-native support for Memoir and other packages I have been using Kile LaTeX Editor for KDE 3.2.2 (1.7a version currently).

    When I want to see exactly what code is doing what Kile is that sort of LaTeX editor but with many helpful features that don't completely hide the code that LyX does for you.

    When LyX releases 1.4 and subsequent 1.4.x releases to refine it my time will be 50/50 along-side Kile.

    Besides the texts that are currently being listed I didn't read an

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