The ideal
situation occurs when the things that we regard as beautiful are also regarded
by other people as useful.
— Donald Knuth
LATEX is a
typesetting program and is an extension of the original program TEX written by
Donald Knuth. It was originally written in the early 1980s by Leslie Lamport at
SRI International. The current version is LaTeX2e. LaTeX is free software and
is distributed under the LaTeX Project Public License (LPPL). The term LaTeX
refers only to the language in which documents are written, not to the editor
application used to write those documents.
In order to create a
document in LaTeX, a .tex file must be created using some form of text editor.
While most text editors can be used to create a LaTeX document, a number of
editors have been created specifically for working with LaTeX.
Installing a distribution
If you want to use
LaTeX locally on your computer, you generally need to install a TeX
distribution. TeX distributions are packaged collections of packages and
programs that enable you to typeset without having to manually fetch files and
configure things. The recommended distributions for each of the major operating
systems are:
MiKTeX is a
Windows-specific distribution.
MacTeX is a Mac
OS-specific distribution based on TeX Live.
TeX Live is a major
TeX distribution for Unix/Linux, Mac OS and Windows.
Getting a text editor
Getting a text editor
You will also need a
text editor to write LaTeX code. You should use a text editor (e.g. Notepad),
not a word processor (Word, Openoffice). Dedicated LaTeX editors are more
useful than plain text editors, because they usually have auto completion of
commands, spell and error checking and handy macros.
LyX is a popular LaTeX editor for Windows, Linux and Mac OS.
Viewers
You will need a
viewer for the files LaTeX outputs. Normally LaTeX saves the final document as
a .dvi (Device independent file format), but you will rarely want it to. DVI
files do not contain embedded fonts and many document viewers are unable to
open them.
Usually you will use
a LaTeX compiler like pdflatex to produce a PDF file directly, or a tool like
dvi2pdf to convert the DVI file to PDF format. Then you can view the result
with your preferred PDF viewer (Adobe Reader, Okular, Evince, Sumatra, Foxit).
Practically all LaTeX
distributions have a DVI viewer for viewing the default output of latex, and
also tools such as dvi2pdf for converting the result automatically to PDF and
PS formats.
Tutorials
Tutorials
These
tutorials are aimed at getting familiar with the bare bones of LaTeX. So read
the tutorials to make use of LaTex completely
Click to download the tutorials.
Click to download the tutorials.
Installation
Download all the
software in order and install them. Be wise in choosing 32-bit or 64-bit
according to your system configuration.
(1)
Download the MiKTeX Net Installer to install a complete MiKTeX system.
(2) Download the latest ghostscript
(3) Download the latest gs viewer
(4) Download the latest pdf viewer.
Useful
links.
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