Book Image

LaTeX Beginner's Guide

Book Image

LaTeX Beginner's Guide

Overview of this book

LaTeX is high-quality Open Source typesetting software that produces professional prints and PDF files. However, as LaTeX is a powerful and complex tool, getting started can be intimidating. There is no official support and certain aspects such as layout modifications can seem rather complicated. It may seem more straightforward to use Word or other WYSIWG programs, but once you've become acquainted, LaTeX's capabilities far outweigh any initial difficulties. This book guides you through these challenges and makes beginning with LaTeX easy. If you are writing Mathematical, Scientific, or Business papers, or have a thesis to write, then this is the perfect book for you. LaTeX Beginner's Guide offers you a practical introduction to LaTeX with plenty of step-by-step examples. Beginning with the installation and basic usage, you will learn to typeset documents containing tables, figures, formulas, and common book elements like bibliographies, glossaries, and indexes and go on to managing complex documents and using modern PDF features. It's easy to use LaTeX, when you have LaTeX Beginner's Guide to hand. This practical book will guide you through the essential steps of LaTeX, from installing LaTeX, formatting, and justification to page design. Right from the beginning, you will learn to use macros and styles to maintain a consistent document structure while saving typing work. You will learn to fine-tune text and page layout, create professional looking tables as well as include figures and write complex mathematical formulas. You will see how to generate bibliographies and indexes with ease. Finally you will learn how to manage complex documents and how to benefit from modern PDF features. Detailed information about online resources like software archives, web forums, and online compilers completes this introductory guide. It's easy to use LaTeX, when you have LaTeX Beginner's Guide to hand.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
LaTeX
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
2
Formatting Words, Lines, and Paragraphs
Index

Time for action – installing TeX Live using the net installer wizard


We will download the TeX Live net installer and install the complete TeX Live distribution on our computer.

  1. Click on downloading over the net or navigate to http://tug.org/texlive/acquire-netinstall.

  2. Download the net installer for Windows by clicking on install-tl.zip.

  3. Extract the file install-tl.zip using your favorite archiving program. For example, WinZip, WinRar, or 7-Zip can do it for you.

  4. Open the folder install-tl-* and double-click the Windows batch file install-tl:

  5. The net installer will automatically detect your language. If it's showing the wrong language, you can force the choice of the language using the lang option at the command prompt such as install-tl –lang=en:

  6. The installation wizard will pop up, as shown in the following screenshot:

  7. Click on the Next button, now it offers to change the installation folder, but it's fine to retain it. In our book, we will refer to this default location:

  8. Click on the Next button. As shown in the following screenshot, choose one of the options, for example, for the creation of shortcuts:

  9. Click on the Next button. You can then confirm the settings and actually start the installation by clicking on the Install button:

  10. The next screenshot shows how you can monitor the installation progress:

  11. Finally, click on the Finish button and you're done.

What just happened?

You have completed the installation of TeX Live 2010. Now your Start menu contains a folder called TeX Live 2010 containing six programs:

  • DVIOUT DVI viewera viewer program for the classic LaTeX output format DVI. Today, most people choose PDF output, so you probably won't need it.

  • PS_VIEWa viewer program for the PostScript format; again you probably won't need it, except if you would like to use the PostScript language or read such documents.

  • TeX Live documentationwell, that's useful regarding setup and use of your software!

  • TeX Live Managerthat's your tool for package management, for example, installation and update of LaTeX packages.

  • TeXdoc GUIit's a graphical user interface offering access to a huge amount of LaTeX-related information. There's a lot of it stored in your computer by now. Use it to gather information whenever needed; it could be quicker than searching online.

  • TeXworks editorthis is an editor developed to create LaTeX documents comfortably. We will make extensive use of it.

Note

TeXworks is also shipped with MiKTeX 2.8 and higher.

If you would like to stay in control over what should be installed on your computer, start the install-tl-advanced batch file instead of install-tl:

The TeX documentation available online contains more information for advanced users.

Now, we will go through the offline installation of TeX Live 2010.