PHYS408W : L_AT^EX Guide

1 Introduction

Papers for PHYS408W will be written using L^ATEX. L^ATEX (http://www.latex-project.org) is a typesetting program that will turn a text file written in the L^ATEX markup language into a typeset graphics file for viewing and printing. It is widely used in physics, astronomy, mathematics, and computer science. You are most likely accustomed to working with WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) publishing software like Microsoft Word. In that case, using a markup language like L^ATEX will seem strange at first. One major benefit to this approach is that the software takes care of the formatting for you. You won't waste any time adjusting margins, tab stops, font sizes, or line spacings spacings. This frees you up to focus on the content of your documents. Another benefit to using L^ATEX is the ease with which you will be able to typeset mathematics.

L^ATEX is not a word processor. It doesn't have a graphical user interface like Word. It simply converts text into typeset graphics files. You will actually compose your documents using TeXnicCenter (http://www.texniccenter.org). TeXnicCenter is an integrated development environment (IDE) for writing L^ATEX documents - basically a souped-up text editor. In addition to L^ATEX and TeXnicCenter, you may also want to use Inkscape (http://www.inkscape.org) - a vector graphics program you can use to produce diagrams which you can include in L^ATEX documents. Section 2 of this document walks you through the installation of all three of these software packages.

The tutorials in Sections 3-8 are meant to prepare you to start writing papers for this course. They are designed to be read in order, and they include exercises that you should complete as you read. Section 3 is a very brief introduction to using TeXnicCenter to produce L^ATEX documents. Section 4 is a guided tour of a template L^ATEX document for PHYS408W papers. L^ATEX supports captioned, numbered figures and tables, numbered mathematical equations, and a list of bibliographic references. The numbering of equations, figures, tables, and bibliographic citations is automated, and cross-referencing is supported. Sections 5-8 focus on several of the above topics.

Further details of using L^ATEX can be tracked down in one of the following documents.

Leslie Lamport, L^ATEX : A Document Preparation System : User's Guide and Reference Manual, 2e, Addison Wesley, 1994

Tobias Oetiker, Hubert Partl, Irene Hyna, and Elisabeth Schlegl, The Not So Short Introduction to L^ATEX2_e, http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/info/lshort

Here is a useful quick reference

Winston Chang, Latex cheat sheet, http://www.stdout.org/~winston/latex, 2002

Copyright © 2006-2009, Lewis A. Riley

Updated Wed Jan 14 22:58:50 2009