University of Virginia Department of Computer Science

About LaTeX

From the comp.text.tex FAQ:
TeX is a software system written by Donald Knuth to typeset text, especially text containing mathematics. LaTeX is a set of macros written in TeX, designed to simplify the typesetting of a document by allowing the user to concentrate on the content and structure of the document rather than the exact appearance of the finished product.
LaTeX is free, and can be run on virtually any platform. It works very nicely on PCs running Linux or FreeBSD.

LaTeX References

The two primary LaTeX references are LaTeX: A Document Preparation System, by Leslie Lamport (Addison Wesley, 1986, ISBN 0-201-15790-X) and The LaTeX Companion, by Michael Goossens, Frank Mittelbach, and Alexander Samarin (Addison Wesley, 1994, ISBN 0-201-54199-8). The newest version of LaTeX is LaTeX2e, be sure to get books which are up to date and cover this version. Note: The LaTeX Companion most likely isn't what you're looking for if you're just learning LaTeX - it covers more advanced issues. Get the Lamport book or one of the other introductory LaTeX books that are available (and usually in stock at the UVa bookstore).

There is a very good help page for LaTeX on the web.

AMS-LaTeX

AMS-LaTeX is a package designed to facilitate writing complex mathematics in LaTeX. Its development was sponsored by the American Mathematical Society, and it is mostly useful only for the nastiest mathematics (like matrices within matrices) - LaTeX already has very powerful mathematical typesetting capabilities.

Usage

Invoke LaTeX by typing latex filename. It will produce lots of extra files like filename.log and filename.aux - these can be safely ignored. See the man pages for details like setting up environment variables (this shouldn't be necessary in general).

The important output of and LaTeX is a file called filename.dvi. DVI files can be viewed in X by typing xdvi filename or printed by typing dvips filename.dvi | lpr.

LaTeX is installed on UVa CS dept machines, and should work by default. LaTeX2e is installed in /usr/cs/contrib/bin, so you should have that directory early in your path.

There are (of course) emacs modes which make editing TeX and LaTeX files easier. If you're lucky, emacs will automatically go into one of those modes when you load a file with the .tex extension. Otherwise, ask somebody who knows a lot about emacs to help you make this happen.

Styles

Several styles exist in /usr/cs/contrib/lib/tex/macros.

Examples

I have a small example of an article and a bibliography, which produce this output.

Also See
HelpNet
HelpNet was created by the 1995 incoming graduate class. It is only occasionally updated.		 Department of Computer Science
School of Engineering, University of Virginia
151 Engineer's Way, P.O. Box 400740
Charlottesville, Virginia 22904-4740
(434) 982-2200  Fax: (434) 982-2214 		Web Comments: webteam@cs.virginia.edu
Admissions Inquiries: inquiry@cs.virginia.edu
Site directory, Other addresses
 Server statistics
© Created by the CS Web Team