3 Using LATEX with TeXnicCenter

3.1 L^ATEX Source Code : .tex Files

A L^ATEX document begins with a \documentclass statement, sometimes followed by other initialization and customization commands, followed by the document contents sandwiched between \begin{document} and \end{document} statements. Here is the source code for a very short document.

\documentclass[12 pt]{article} \begin{document} \noindent Hello, world! \LaTeX\ can typeset equations like \begin{equation} \int^{2 \pi}_0 \sin^2 \theta d\theta = \frac{1}{2} \end{equation} very nicely! \end{document}

File -> New...

File -> Save As...

hello.tex

Before you add very much code to your source file, you ought to run it through the L^ATEX program to locate possible errors and view the output, which brings us to the next topic ...

3.2 Viewing and Printing Typeset Documents : .dvi Files

Once you have the source code for your document in a .tex file, you can ``compile'' it using L^ATEX into a graphics file for viewing and printing. Click on Build -> Current File -> Build, and a string of messages from L^ATEX will appear in the TeXnicCenter output frame. The output should look very much like:

--------------------Output Profile: LaTeX => DVI-------------------- This is pdfTeX, Version 3.1415926-1.40.11 (MiKTeX 2.9) entering extended mode ("hello.tex" LaTeX2e <2009/09/24> Babel <v3.8l> and hyphenation patterns for english, afrikaans, ancientgreek, ar abic, armenian, assamese, basque, bengali, bokmal, bulgarian, catalan, coptic, croatian, czech, danish, dutch, esperanto, estonian, farsi, finnish, french, ga lician, german, german-x-2009-06-19, greek, gujarati, hindi, hungarian, iceland ic, indonesian, interlingua, irish, italian, kannada, kurmanji, lao, latin, lat vian, lithuanian, malayalam, marathi, mongolian, mongolianlmc, monogreek, ngerm an, ngerman-x-2009-06-19, nynorsk, oriya, panjabi, pinyin, polish, portuguese, romanian, russian, sanskrit, serbian, slovak, slovenian, spanish, swedish, swis sgerman, tamil, telugu, turkish, turkmen, ukenglish, ukrainian, uppersorbian, u senglishmax, welsh, loaded. ("D:\Program Files\MiKTeX 2.9\tex\latex\base\article.cls" Document Class: article 2007/10/19 v1.4h Standard LaTeX document class ("D:\Program Files\MiKTeX 2.9\tex\latex\base\size12.clo" ("hello.aux") [1] ("hello.aux") ) Output written on hello.dvi (1 page, 764 bytes). Transcript written on hello.log. LaTex-Result: 0 Error(s), 0 Warning(s), 0 Bad Box(es), 1 Page(s)

For example, if I leave the ``t'' off of the \noindent statement in hello.tex, I get the following error message in addition to the other messages shown above.

If you are following along with your own hello.tex file, you will find that L^ATEX has produced the additional files hello.aux, hello.log, and hello.dvi in the directory in which you saved your hello.tex file. The .dvi file contains the typeset document in a graphics format (device independent format) that we can view using Build -> View Output. This runs a dvi file viewing program called Yap (Yet another previewer). Your Yap window should show you a digital representation of your typeset document, similar to that shown in Figure 1.

**Figure 1:** The interesting portion of the `.dvi` output from L^ATEX shown by Yap. The rest of the (mostly blank) page and the page number have been omitted.
$\begin{figure}\fbox{ \parbox{6.3 in}{ \vspace{6 pt} Hello, world! \LaTeX\ can ty... ...(u) du = \frac{1}{2} \end{equation}very nicely! \vspace{4 pt} } } \end{figure}$

3.3 TeXnicCenter Tips

TeXnicCenter automatically saves your .tex file when you build.

Once you have displayed your document, leave the Yap window open, and it will automatically update the document with later builds. This saves you the trouble of waiting for Yap to run every time you make a change.

Hover your pointer over the buttons in the toolbars to get descriptions of their functions.

In the toolbar directly below the TeXnicCenter menu bar, there are shortcut buttons for building ( $\scalebox{0.7}{\includegraphics{build.eps}}$ ) and viewing ( $\scalebox{0.7}{\includegraphics{view.eps}}$ ) documents. There is a particularly useful button ( $\scalebox{0.7}{\includegraphics{buildview.eps}}$ ) that builds and displays your typeset document in one step.
The right side of the lower toolbar is full of shortcut buttons for mathematics syntax ( $\scalebox{0.7}{\includegraphics{math.eps}}$ ).
The left side of the lower toolbar is full of shortcut buttons for changing font - boldface, italics, etc ...- ( $\scalebox{0.7}{\includegraphics{fonts.eps}}$ ) and text alignment ( $\scalebox{0.7}{\includegraphics{alingnment.eps}}$ )