Brief Latex Tutorial

What is LaTeX?

LaTeX, pronounced "lah teck", is a set of filters for typesetting technical documents such as papers, theises, disserations, books, reports, etc. It offers excellent support for making indices, citations, maintaining bibliographies thought the lifetime of a researcher, etc. For a good complete introduction there is a mass of documtation on latex.

I require LaTeX of all my grad students because the quality of publication and low effort required to create them makes it well worth dragging them kicking and screaming into LaTeX. :-) They often thank me for making their life easier later.

In order to accept latex you have to get over the idea that anything with a GUI is better than something without one. I think there is always room for both.

Where do I get LaTeX?

For windows there is miktek which works beautifully.

LaTeX is on many unix systems including the ones in the CS department. You can get a copy for your unix system at CTAN (Comprehensive TeX Archive Network) or TUG TeX Users Group

For your Apple OS-X you have unix already so latex will work but there is also TeXshop which is a previewer for Apple written in Cocoa which is kind of like ghostscript. There is also a program named OzTex that I know much about.

What else do I need?

You will need Ghostview to display postscript on your machine.

What type of output files can I get?

When you run latex you will get a dvi file out. You can use a dvi viewer to view the text or you can use dvips to convert the dvi file to postscript. You can get pdf output by using either dvipdf or just using pdflatex instead of latex. These tools should come with your latex installation.