Note: These pages are a local mirror of Professor Tony Roberts' very extensive LaTeX information website at the University of Southern Queensland, which comprises introductory explanation, full reference material, and links to further sources. I am grateful to Professor Roberts for permission to mirror his site. I have changed some of the follow-up URLs to point to US rather than Australian sites, but the hard work is all Tony Roberts'. If you find any loose ends in the cross-referencing here it is probably my fault, so please address questions to me.

Allin Cottrell (cottrell@wfu.edu), Department of Economics, Wake Forest University.
September, 2003

LaTeX: from quick and dirty to style and finesse

by Prof Tony Roberts Dept of Mathematics and Computing University of Southern Queensland 3 August, 1998; updated June 2003

Links2Go Key Resource LaTeX Topic

Why LaTeX?

• It is arguably the premier typesetting package in the world. Knuth and Lamport have distilled for us the accumulated wisdom of generations of printers.
• The TeX system typesets documents with line and page breaks to maximise readability and appeal by avoiding as far as possible poor breaks and hyphenation.
• It is simply the best package for documents containing mathematics.
  ``TeX can print virtually any mathematical thought that comes into your head, and print it beautifully.'' (Herbert S. Wilf, 1986)
• It is free on virtually every computer in the world.
• It is portable---stick to the standard commands and everyone can read and exchange documents.
• The source file is purely alphanumeric so it can be read by eye or posted by e-mail with no problems associated with different versions or binary files.
• LaTeX has the reputation of being hard, but in fact it is effectively the same as HTML!
• Weakness: it is not usually WYSIWIG.

Note that the "X" in LaTeX or TeX is pronounced as a hard sound as in the "ck" in "teck"

In a document of this size it is not possible to include everything that you might need to know, and if you intend to make extensive use of the LaTeX you should refer to a more complete reference. Instead this is an idiosyncratic introduction to the basic elements and philosophy of using LaTeX.

Other useful introductions and material may be found on the net.

Online is a fairly complete LaTeX2e reference (162k,html), suitable for browsing, searching or access via its index. Look now at the Overview to see common files generated by LaTeX.

Also seek advice of the electronic news group comp.text.tex, and the distilled advice of its answered Frequently Asked Questions.

Contents

1. A quick and dirty start
2. Environments
3. Cross referencing
4. More mathematics
5. Figures, tables and seminars
6. Write right for research
7. and possibly more, but not yet