Norm Matloff's L^AT_EX  Tutorial Site

Professor Norm Matloff
Dept. of Computer Science
University of California at Davis
Davis, CA 95616
matloff@cs.ucdavis.edu

L^AT_EX  is a typesetting system which is very popular with computer scientists, engineers, mathematicians, physicists etc. It is especially good for mathematical work, but is also used by many nonscientists. It offers far more flexibility and beauty than you get in something like MS Word.

In fact, Prof. Donald Knuth of Stanford University, who is the developer of T_EX  the package at the core of L^AT_EX  (the latter being a set of T_EX  macros), reportedly once came close to convincing Newsweek magazine to use L^AT_EX  (actually, TeX, the foundation of L^AT_EX  ) for its typesetting operations. Wikipedia uses L^AT_EX  for its math typesetting (to see it, go to a math topic in Wikipedia and then ask your browser to display the Page Source).

Another advantage of L^AT_EX  is that you can easily convert your L^AT_EX  documents to slide presentation format, rather than retyping the former material for the latter.

L^AT_EX  is available both in free, public-domain versions, as well as in commercial products, and is available for most platforms (Unix/Linux, Windows, Macs).

L^AT_EX  can be learned very quickly! You can pick up enough knowledge to work at a basic level in literally just 5 minutes. See "5-minute L^AT_EX tutorial" below.

Information available at this Web site:

• for a really quick but quite useful introduction, see Dr. Matloff's 5-minute L^AT_EX tutorial
• his file LookHereFirst.html often enables quick lookups for questions that arise with intermediate L^AT_EX  users
• a partial list of other LaTeX tutorials
• for those who prefer GUIs, Dr. Matloff's tutorial on LyX, a GUI for LaTeX; you may also wish to try gummi, for smaller documents.
• material on using LaTeX to create presentations
• material on installing style files
• material on the ACM and IEEE LaTeX macros
• material on LaTeX-to-HTML converters
• useful links

A partial list of other LaTeX tutorials:

There are many L^AT_EX  tutorials on the Web. Here are just a few of them:

• Getting Started with LaTeX, by D. Wilkins, 46 pages
• Getting to Grips with LaTeX, by Andrew Roberts, a few pages on each topic (tables, figures, etc.)
• Formatting Information , by Peter Flynn, 219 pages
• Very nice LaTeX math site, arranged so that you can find what you need fast: LaTeX Cookbook

Books that I like (though I primarily use the Web):

• LaTeX for Linux (NOT just for Linux), by Bernice Sacks Lipkin
• LaTeX: A Document Preparation System, a User's Guide and Reference Manual (second edition), by Leslie Lamport
• The LaTeX Companion (2nd edition), by Frank Mittelbach, Michel Goossens, Johannes Braams, David Carlisle and Chris Rowley

Using LaTeX to create presentations:

L^AT_EX  can be used to produce slide shows, complete with overlays, animations and so on. One big advantage that it has over Powerpoint is that you can reuse your material in your L^AT_EX  document for use in a presentation. In other words, suppose you've written a report, and now want to make a slide presentation from it. You can simply copy your report's .tex file to a new one, then edit the latter according to what you want to retain for your slides. Why type in the same stuff twice? And again, if you do any math, Powerpoint just isn't very effective.

I have tutorials on my Web page for the two most popular presentation packages for L^AT_EX  today:

• Beamer
• Prosper

Programs to convert LaTeX to HTML, RTF:

Here is a partial list:

• latex2html: This is the most famous one, very widely used. I dislike some of its features, and it is very bulky, but it is certainly very useful.
• tth: This is the one I use. Good package, very fast. Comes in the simpler free version, and a more powerful commercial version.
• ltoh: This is certainly the most elegant L^AT_EX  -to-HTML conversion program I've seen, really neat. Its main drawbacks are that it does not handle math or graphics, and it does not handle the L^AT_EX  \tableofcontents command.
• To convert from L^AT_EX  for input to Microsoft Word, use latex2rtf to change to RTF, which is importable by Microsoft Word.

Installing Style Files

If you download an .sty file, see installation instructions here.

Using the ACM and IEEE LaTeX Macros

For ACM, go to http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/~matloff/LaTeX/FTP/ to see an actual example (a paper of mine) in which you can see how the macros are used. You'll need to copy all of the files in that directory.

Similarly, for an IEEE example, go to http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/~matloff/LaTeX/SimSym/.

Useful links:

• TeX Users Group (lots of materials). Note in particular their interesting URLs and free implementation list (Unix/Linux, Windows, Mac) subpages.

• CTAN sites: These contain not only the L^AT_EX  /TeX packages themselves, but hundreds of very useful macros contributed by users all over the world. CTAN search, Germany; see also mirror in Ireland.
• Emory University L^AT_EX  reference site, essentially a group of "man pages" for the various L^AT_EX  commands.
• List of LaTeX math symbols.
• another list of LaTeX math symbols
• Various (La)TeX resources, such as lists of various macros from the CTAN sites.

Other software Web sites by Norm Matloff:

• Professor Matloff's Unix/C tutorials.

• His Java tutorial.

• Dr. Matloff's beginner's guide to installing and using Linux.

• His "Extremely Quick and Simple Introduction to the Vi Text editor," and his introductions to the elvis and vim extensions to vi. The latter are much better than ordinary vi (and far, far better than pico). X11 mouse capability; subwindows (even on nongraphics terminals); infinite undo; paragraph formatting and so on.

• Norman Matloff's guide to fast debugging! See also his text-editing tips designed especially for programmers.

• Professor Matloff's LaTeX tutorial and resource page, and his tutorial on LyX, a GUI interface to L^AT_EX  .

• Dr. Matloff's introduction to the mutt e-mail utility. Don't use pine! It was designed for people who are afraid of computers, not for computer experts.

• Norm Matloff's Chinese-language software page.