Prof. Norm Matloff's 5-Minute L^AT_EX  Tutorial

I will assume here that you already have L^AT_EX  installed on your machine. It is on the CSIF machines in the UCD CS Dept., and comes with most Linux distributions. It is available for download on Linux, Microsoft Windows, Macs, etc. If you need to install it on your machine, I recommend consulting the installation section of one of the many Web tutorials on L^AT_EX  , some of which are listed here.

Here is your quick intro to L^AT_EX  :

• Copy the file FvMn.tex for your own usage.
• From any command window in which you are in the directory where you have FvMn.tex, type

  pdflatex FvMn.tex
  

  This produces a PDF file, FvMn.pdf.

• View FvMn.pdf using Acroread, xpdf or any other PDF viewer.
• Now compare the PDF output on your screen to the input file, FvMn.tex, in order to try to see what input commands produce what output. You will be helped in that regard by reading the comments in FvMn.tex (marked by percent signs).
• You should now be ready to create simple L^AT_EX  documents by yourself. I suggest starting by making small changes to FvMn.tex.

At this point, you already know the basics of L^AT_EX  pretty well. To learn more, your next step should be to go through a few more real examples:

A few more examples:

Again, beginners should at this point continue with a few more examples, simply comparing some L^AT_EX  files with their PDF outputs. You will learn very fast this way. Here are a few L^AT_EX  examples you can use:

• one of my course syllabi
• an ad for a course; it also needs some JPEG image files--this one, this one and this one; important note: the pdflatex command is capable of processing two kinds of image files, JPEG and PDF
• a file with extensive, though basic math content

Where to go from here:

My "look here first" file is only minimally organized, but if you use your browser's search feature, you probably will find what you want here.

My LaTeX home page has many resources you can use for advanced L^AT_EX  operations.