Norman Matloff's LaTeX Tutorial, Including LyX

Norm Matloff's LATEX  Tutorial Site

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

LATEX  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 TEX  the package at the core of LATEX  (the latter being a set of TEX  macros), reportedly once came close to convincing Newsweek magazine to use LATEX  (actually, TeX, the foundation of LATEX  ) for its typesetting operations. Wikipedia uses LATEX  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 LATEX  is that you can easily convert your LATEX  documents to slide presentation format, rather than retyping the former material for the latter.

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

LATEX  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 LATEX tutorial" below.

Information available at this Web site:

A partial list of other LaTeX tutorials:

There are many LATEX  tutorials on the Web. Here are just a few of them:

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

Using LaTeX to create presentations:

LATEX  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 LATEX  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 LATEX  today:

Programs to convert LaTeX to HTML, RTF:

Here is a partial list:

Installing Style Files

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

Using the ACM and IEEE LaTeX Macros

ACM and IEEE require a certain format, for which they have made available sets of 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:

Other software Web sites by Norm Matloff: