Latex Help - Dennis Boos

Latex Help - Dennis Boos

I preview my .ps files with ghostview. Others prefer to preview the .dvi files with xdvi. It is not clear what is the best way to prepare your text documents. I use the SAS editor because I'm familiar with it and because it has line numbers which make finding errors easy. Emacs with auc.tex is supposed to be good. On pc's, winEDT seems to be worth getting.

At home I use Miktex (free shareware version of latex) on my home PC's. You can get the ftp information from Terry Byron. It is pretty easy to set up. I use gsview to view the .ps files. This also allows printing without having a postscript printer.

It is essential to buy the classic reference

  • Latex User's Guide and Refrerence Manual by Leslie Lamport.

    I also recommend

  • Learning Latex by Griffiths and Higham (SIAM, 1997)

    The next recommended book seems to be

  • The Latex Companion by Goosens, Mittelbach, and Samarini.

    I skimmed it and it looks pretty advanced and complicated and refers a lot to the new version of latex, Latex2e. (Both versions are on SRCIS.) There are at least 6 more books in D.H. Hill library, but they are often checked out.

    I surfed the net (April 1996) to find some online help. The best I could find was Essential Latex by Jon Warwick which is a pretty nice introduction to Latex (17 pages).

    In addition I have made a file of examples which I hope to keep adding to. Both of these are worth viewing and/or printing out. Here are some other examples:

    template.tex: a template to start latex (2.09) documents with.
    biblio.tex: a references template.
    title_ab.tex: a template for cover pages and abstract.

    Next comes a variety of tables:

    Code: table1.tex and view it by clcking table1.ps
    Code: table2.tex and view it by clcking table2.ps
    Code: table3.tex and view it by clcking table3.ps
    Code: table4.tex and view it by clcking table4.ps
    Code: table5.tex and view it by clcking table5.ps
    Code: table6.tex and view it by clcking table6.ps
    Code: table7.tex and view it by clcking table7.ps

    Now some ways of doing slides:

    This first method is pretty spiffy (from Marie Davidian via Jackie Hughes-Oliver):
    Code: slides5.tex and view it by clcking slides5.ps
    You must hit "Swap Landscape" in Ghostview to get it right-side-up.

    This second method just magnifies basic latex when you dvips.
    You must use dvips -x2000 filename. I got it from Peter Bloomfield.
    Code: x2000ex.tex and view it by clcking x2000ex.ps

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