Wenguang Wang's LaTeX Introduction
This page is an introduction of LaTeX for beginners. This page was
built based on my experience learning LaTeX as a beginner. Most
documents were not written by me, but I try to give you good
suggestions so that you can start using LaTeX to write your documents
in the shortest time.
By reaching this page, I assume that you find LaTeX is suitable for
some of your document writing work. But if you are not sure whether
you should use LaTeX, see Why
LaTeX.
This page contains LaTeX documents for beginners, sample LaTeX
files, drawing graphics in LaTeX, setting up LaTeX and xfig on
Windows, etc.
- How to read LaTeX?
It is lei-tek. Some people read it as
la-tek. But NEVER read it as lei-teks, which is a rubber product.
- LaTeX introductions.
I first learned LaTeX from these manuals. They
are very well written and easy to understand.
- A Simplified Introduction to LaTeX. Download pdf (1.9M) and the README. This is the first file I
read to learn LaTeX. It is well written and very easy to
follow. It contains the most useful stuff a LaTeX beginner needs to
know. Although this file has more than 100 pages, I could finish it
very quickly and start writing my first LaTeX file!
- The Not So Short Introduction to
LaTeX2e. Download PDF. This
is a popular introduction document. It is more complete than the
previous one. It is also easy to search due to its pdf format. I often
search for help from this file before I search comp.text.tex and google. Note: although BibTeX should
be used for bibliographies, it is not introduced in this
document. Please refer to the previous documentation A
Simplified Introduction to LaTeX about how to use BibTeX.
- Using Imported Graphics in LaTeX2e. Download ps (700K) or ps.gz
(200K). This file explains how to include graphics files in
LaTeX.
- The Comprehensive LaTeX Symbol List tells how to produce 2,500 symbols in LaTeX. Here is my local copy.
- My presentation file in PowerPoint (30K)
and HTML. This is a very short
presentation file introducing LaTeX to Word users.
- LaTeX for Word Processor Users
discusses how to perform common tasks in LaTeX for users who know how
to do so in MS Word.
- Generating pdf from LaTeX
LaTeX file can be used to generate postscript or pdf format. The
pdf file has many advantages than postscript. It can contain bookmarks
of the table of contents, hyperlinks to the figures, tables,
bibliography references, or web site links. This page introduces how to generate pdf
file from your LaTeX source file.
- LaTeX Sample File
This is my LaTeX sample file. It includes many common used features
of a LaTeX document, including but not limited to figures, tables,
subfigures.
- Graphics
LaTeX does not support drawing figures in WYSIWYG way. You need
other software to draw figures, convert to eps, and import the eps file into your LaTeX file as
explained in this file. Depends on the
feature of your figure, different graphics packages may fit you.
- Xfig -- xfig is a free graphics editor. If you like the WYSIWYG
environment, and your figure cannot be easily represented by simple
math equations, this probably is a suitable
tool. Xfig can be installed easily on Unix or Windows. Here are some
useful links about xfig:
- Matlab -- Matlab is
commercial software. It can create bar charts, line graphs, pie charts then export them as EPS files.
- Adobe Illustrator -- Illustrator is commercial software. It can open
PDF files directly like an EPS. You can print figures from MS Office to
PS, convert to PDF with Ghostscript+GSView or Acrobat and open them in
Illustrator, edit and save to EPS.
- Pstricks -- pstricks
is a (La)TeX package which allow to use the major part of PostScript
capabilities inside (La)TeX. Pstricks cannot be used together with pdfLaTeX.
- MetaPost -- MetaPost is
a graphics drawing language based on Knuth's MetaFont. It is
very powerful and suitable for accurate figures that can be described
by math equations. However, it uses text scripts and does not have a WYSIWYG interface. See these
examples (pdf format).
- Microsoft Powerpoint, Excel, Word or any other Windows software.
After you draw your figures, you need to convert them to eps by a
Postscript printer driver.
- Install this Lexmark Color 4079 plus
PS2 printer driver, which works for Windows 2000 and XP. This driver supports
color prints besides black-white prints.
- Select the installed printer from the print command of the software. Select the
output to eps and save to a ps file(screenshot).
- Open the ps file in GSView, and select File->"PS to EPS" to
save to an eps file.
- Bibliography Database Server
- Plot bar chart (filled boxes)
If you have MS Excel or similar programs from other Office suites,
you can draw bar charts and then convert to eps:
- Install this Lexmark Color 4079 plus
PS2, which works for Windows 2000 and XP. This driver supports
color prints besides black-white prints.
- Select print in Excel to print the bar chart to this
printer. Select the output to eps and save to a ps file(screenshot).
- Open the ps file in GSView, and select File->"PS to EPS" to
save to an eps file.
Gnuplot is a good tool to plot various figures. However, it does
not support filled bar charts. The solution in this link does not work
very well. MetaPost with the ascii_chart
macro package can be used to draw bar charts, which is not WYSIWYG.
- Creating
Presentations in PDFLaTeX
LaTeX (or TeX) can be used to generate beautiful presentation
slides in pdf format. There are several packages that can do
this. PPower4 is one of it. The advantage is that you can generate beautiful
math equations easily. The disadvantages are: (1) it is hard to add
more fonts to LaTeX (2) it is harder than PowerPoint to arrange the
location and size of texts.
- Get LaTeX Software
- Get help for LaTeX
My test page (under construction)
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