TEX and LATEX Math mode

By Herbert Vob

It is often said that TEX was designed for mathematical or technical purposes. This may be true when we remember the reasons why Donald Knuth created TEX. But nowadays there are many examples in which TEX is used for publications with no mathematical or technical background content. However, writing publications with such material is one of the important advantages of TEX. Because it seems impossible to know all existing macros and options of (LA)TEX and the several additional packages, especially of AMSmath. This is the reason why I have attempted to gather all the relevant facts in this paper.

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LATEX for Word Processor Users

By Guido Gonzato

Text processing with LATEX offers several advantages over word processing. However, it is often hard for beginners to figure out how to perform common tasks and obtain certain features. This manual attempts to ease the transition by drawing comparisons between word processing and LATEX typesetting. The main word processor capabilities are listed, along with their equivalent LATEX commands. Lots of examples are provided.

First of all, let me state that this is not a LATEX primer! If you’re reading this, I assume that you have at least a smattering of LATEX and its basic commands. In this document, I’ll explain why LATEX is a viable alternative to word processors. One may even think that LATEX is better than any word processor. . . and this is definitely true, especially if you write complex documents with lots of maths.

Nevertheless, word processors are the ‘killer app’ in modern office automation. They’re perceived to be easier than LATEX as they have a friendly WYSIWYG interface, and the average secretary will learn to use them in a relatively short time. The problem is, these beasts keep growing slow, bloated1, buggy, expensive, virus ridden, and incompatible with each other.

LATEX might be a good alternative. It actually is, but if you try to write casual, unstructured documents, LATEX will rightly stand in the way. You could resort to plain TEX, but you would lose many facilities that LATEX provides.

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Modifying LATEX

By LATEX3 Project Team.

This document was produced in response to suggestions that the modification and distribution conditions for the files constituting the New Standard LATEX system should be similar to those implied by Version 2 of the GNU General Public Licence, as published by the Free Software Foundation.

This article describes the principles underlying our policy on distribution and modification of the files comprising the LATEX system. It has been produced as a result of detailed discussions of the issues involved in the support and maintenance of a widely distributed document processing system used by diverse people for many applications. These discussions have involved users, maintainers of installations that support LATEX and various types of organizations that distribute it. The discussions are continuing and we hope that the ideas in this article will make a useful contribution to the debate.

Our aim is that LATEX should be a system which can be trusted by users of all types to fulfill their needs. Such a system must be stable and well-maintained.

This implies that it must be reasonably easy to maintain (otherwise it will simply not get maintained at all). So here is a summary of our basic philosophy:

• We believe that the freedom to rely on a widely-used standard for document interchange and formatting is as important as the freedom to experiment with the contents of files.
• We are therefore adopting a policy similar to that which Donald Knuth applies to modifications of the underlying TEX system: that certain files, together with their names, are part of the system and therefore the contents of these files should not be changed unless the following conditions are met:

• they are clearly marked as being no longer part of the standard system;
• the name of the file is changed.

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Page layout in LATEX

By Piet van Oostrum

This article describes how to customize the page layout of your LaTeX documents, i.e how to change page margings and sizes, headers and footers, and the proper placement of figures and tables (collectively called floats) on the page.

Originally this was the documentation of the fancyheadings package. It did contain also other info, e.g. advanced use of marks. It has now been upgraded to include more, e.g. the handling of floats. The fancyheadings documentation has been upgraded to conform to version 2 of this package1. For reasons of compatibility with certain operating systems, the name of the package has been changed to fancyhdr.

Although this paper uses LATEX commands, most of the techniques can be used with older LATEXversions with appropriate changes.

A page in a LATEX document is built from various elements as shown in figure 1. The body contains the main text of the document together with the so called floats (tables and figures). The pages are constructed by LATEX’s output routine, which is quite complicated and should therefore not be modified. Some of the packages described in this paper contains small modifications to the output routine to accomplish things that cannot be done in another way. You should use these packages to get the desired result rather than fiddling with the output routine yourself.

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LATEX and the Gnuplot Plotting Program

By David Kotz

Gnuplot was originally developed by Colin Kelley and Thomas Williams in 1986 to plot functions and data files on a variety of terminals. In 1988 and 1989 I created an alternate version, known as GnuTEX, that supported a new “terminal type” called latex, so gnuplot would output LATEX code. The plot could then be included in a LATEX document. I added a number of embellishments, supported only by the latex terminal, allowing the user to produce publication-quality plots.

In late 1989 and early 1990 GnuTEX and a number of other gnuplot variants were merged together into a new release of gnuplot, 2.0. This includes, among many other improvements, a LATEX driver derived from the one in GnuTEX. Former GnuTEX users are referred to Section 4 for information about adapting to gnuplot. Anyone interested in using gnuplot with LATEX should read the next section, a tutorial, and the primary gnuplot manual.

The reader should note that the LATEX picture environments output by gnuplot can be quite large and complicated, and can easily exceed the memory capacity of TEX. If an enlarged version of TEX is available, it is wise to use it. Otherwise, keep your plots simple and add \clearpage to your document where necessary. There is also a new EEPIC driver (eepic), intended for use with the EEPIC macro package for LATEX. EEPIC allows for much more efficient line-drawing, runs through LATEX faster, and uses less memory. See Section 3 for more information.

There is a small package of auxiliary files (makefiles and scripts) that I find useful for making LATEX plots with gnuplot. This is available for ftp as pub/gnuplot-latex.shar from cs.duke.edu. I can mail copies (see the end of this paper for information).

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Using Imported Graphics in LATEX and pdfLATEX

By Keith Reckdahl

This document describes first how to import graphics into LATEX documents and then covers a wide variety issues about their use.

When TEX was written, PostScript/History eps, jpeg, gif, and other graphic formats did not exist. As a result, Knuth’s dvi format does not have direct support for imported graphics. However, TEX allows dvi files to contain \special commands which pass commands to programs which use dvi files. This allowed TEX and LATEX to import any graphic format which is supported by the dvi program being used.

For many years, dvi files were usually converted to PostScript and the standard imported-graphic format was Encapsulated PostScript (eps), which is a subset of the PostScript language. Inserting eps graphics in LATEX originally required the low-level \special command. To make graphic-insertion easier and more portable, two higher-level packages epsf and psfig were written for LATEX2.09. In epsf, the graphics insertion was done by the \epsfbox command, while three other commands controlled graphic scaling. In psfig, the \psfig command not only inserted graphics, it also scaled and rotated them. While the psfig syntax was popular, its code was not as robust as epsf. As a result, the epsfig package was created as a hybrid of the two graphics packages, with its \epsfig command using the \psfig syntax and much of the more-robust \epsfbox code. Unfortunately, \epsfig still used some of the less-robust \psfig code.

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LATEX Command Summary

This listing contains short descriptions of the control sequences that are likely to be handy for users of LATEX v2.09 layered on TEX v2.0. Some of these commands are LATEX macros, while others belong to plain TEX; no attempt to dierentiate them is made.

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Short Math Guide for LATEX

By Michael Downes

This is a concise summary of recommended features in LATEX and a couple of extension packages for writing math formulas. Readers needing greater depth of detail are referred to the sources listed in the bibliography, especially [Lamport], [LUG], [AMUG], [LFG], [LGG], and [LC]. A certain amount of familiarity with standard LATEX terminology is assumed; if your memory needs refreshing on the LATEX meaning of command, optional argument, environment, package, and so forth, see [Lamport].

The features described here are available to you if you use LATEX with two extension packages published by the American Mathematical Society: amssymb and amsmath. Thus, the source file for this document begins with

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{amssymb,amsmath}

The amssymb package might be omissible for documents whose math symbol usage is relatively modest; the easiest way to test this is to leave out the amssymb reference and see if any math symbols in the document produce ‘Undefined control sequence’ messages. Many noteworthy features found in other packages are not covered here; see Section 10. Regarding math symbols, please note especially that the list given here is not intended to be comprehensive, but to illustrate such symbols as users will normally find already present in their LATEX system and usable without installing any additional fonts or doing other setup work.

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Math into LATEX An Introduction to LATEX and AMS-LATEX

By George Gratzer

It is indeed a lucky author who is given the opportunity to completely rewrite a book barely a year after its publication. Writing about software affords such opportunities (especially if the original edition sold out), since the author is shooting at a moving target.

LATEX and AMS-LATEX improved dramatically with the release of the new standard LATEX (called LATEX2") in June of 1994 and the revision of AMS-LATEX (version 1.2) in February of 1995. The change in AMS-LATEX is profound. LATEX2" made it possible for AMS-LATEX to join the LATEX world. One of the main points of the present book is to make this clear. This book introduces LATEX as a tool for mathematical typesetting, and treats AMS-LATEX as a set of enhancements to the standard LATEX, to be used in conjunction with hundreds of other LATEX2" enhancements.

I am not a TEX expert. Learning the mysteries of the system has given me great respect for those who crafted it: Donald Knuth, Leslie Lamport, Michael Spivak, and others did the original work; David Carlisle, Michael J. Downes, David M. Jones, Frank Mittelbach, Rainer Sch¨opf, and many others built on the work of these pioneers to create the new LATEX and AMS-LATEX.

TEX, LATEX, and AMS-LATEX

TEX is a typesetting language created by Donald E. Knuth; it has extensive capabilities to typeset math. LATEX is an extension of TEX designed by Leslie Lamport; its major features include

• a strong focus on document structure and the logical markup of text; 
• automatic numbering and cross-referencing.

AMS-LATEX distills the decades-long experience of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) in publishing mathematical journals and books; it adds to LATEX a host of features related to mathematical typesetting, especially the typesetting of multiline formulas and the production of finely-tuned printed output. Articles written in LATEX (and AMS-LATEX) are accepted for publication by an increasing number of journals, including all the journals of the AMS.

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Getting Started with LaTeX

By David R. Wilkins

TeX is a computer program for typesetting documents, created by D. E. Knuth. It takes a suitably prepared computer file and converts it to a form that may be printed on many kinds of printers, including dot-matrix printers, laser printers and high-resolution typesetting machines. A number of well-established publishers now use TeX in order to typeset books and mathematical journals.

Simple documents that do not contain mathematical formulae or tables may be produced very easily: the body of the text is typed in essentially unaltered (though observing certain rules regarding quotation marks and punctuation dashes). Typesetting mathematics is somewhat more involved, but even here TeX is comparatively straightforward to use when one considers the complexity of some of the formulae that it is required to typeset.

LaTeX, written by L. B. Lamport, is one of a number of `dialects' of TeX. It is particularly suited to the production of long articles and books, since it has facilities for the automatic numbering of chapters, sections, theorems, equations etc., and also has facilities for cross-referencing. It is probably one of the most suitable version of LaTeX for beginners to use.

This introduction describes basic features of LaTeX2e, released in 1994. Further information on LaTeX is to be found in the 2nd edition of LaTeX User's Guide and Reference Manual by Leslie Lamport, and in The LaTeX Companion by Michel Goossens, Frank Mittelbach and Alexander Samarin.

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A beginner's introduction to typesetting with LATEX

By Peter Flynn

This book originally accompanied a 2-day course on using the LATEX typesetting system. It has been extensively revised and updated and can now be used for self-study or in the classroom. It is aimed at users of Linux, Macintosh, or Microsoft Windows but it can be used with LATEX systems on any platform, including other Unix workstations, mainframes, and even your Personal Digital Assistant (PDA).

Objectives of this book
By the end of this book, you should be able to undertake the following tasks:

• use a plain-text editor to create and maintain your documents;
• add LATEX markup to identify your document structure and formatting requirements;
• typeset LATEX documents, correct simple formatting errors, and display or print the results;
• identify, install, and use additional packages (using CTAN for downloading where necessary);
• recognize the limitations of procedural markup systems and choose appropriate generic markup methods where appropriate.

There is occasionally some confusion among newcomers between the two main programs, TEX and LATEX:

TEX is a typesetting program, originally written by Prof Knuth at Stanford around 1978. It implements a macrodriven typesetters’ programming language of some 300 basic operations and it has formed the core of many other desktop publishing (DTP) systems. Although it is still
possible to write in the raw TEX language, you need to study it in depth, and you need to be able to write macros (subprograms) to perform even the simplest of repetitive tasks.

LATEX is a user interface for TEX, designed by Leslie Lamport at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1985 to automate all the common tasks of document preparation. It provides a simple way for authors and typesetters to use the power of TEX without having to learn the underlying language. LATEX is the recommended system for all users except professional typographic programmers and computer scientists who want to study the internals of TEX.

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The Not So Short Introduction to LATEX

By Tobias Oetiker, Hubert Partl, Irene Hyna and Elisabeth Schlegl

LATEX is a typesetting system that is very suitable for producing scientific and mathematical documents of high typographical quality. It is also suitable for producing all sorts of other documents, from simple letters to complete books. LATEX uses TEX [2] as its formatting engine. This short introduction describes LATEX2" and should be sufficient for most applications of LATEX.

This introduction is split into 6 chapters:

Chapter 1 tells you about the basic structure of LATEX2" documents. You will also learn a bit about the history of LATEX. After reading this chapter, you should have a rough understanding how LATEX works. Chapter 2 goes into the details of typesetting your documents. It explains most of the essential LATEX commands and environments. After reading this chapter, you will be able to write your first documents.

Chapter 3 explains how to typeset formulae with LATEX. Many examples demonstrate how to use one of LATEX’s main strengths. At the end of the chapter are tables listing all mathematical symbols available in LATEX.

Chapter 4 explains indexes, bibliography generation and inclusion of EPS graphics. It introduces creation of PDF documents with pdfLATEX and presents some handy extension  packages.

Chapter 5 shows how to use LATEX for creating graphics. Instead of drawing a picture with some graphics program, saving it to a file and then including it into LATEX you describe the picture and have LATEX draw it for you.

Chapter 6 contains some potentially dangerous information about how to alter the standard document layout produced by LATEX. It will tell you how to change things such that the beautiful output of LATEX turns ugly or stunning, depending on your abilities.

It is important to read the chapters in order—the book is not that big, after all. Be sure to carefully read the examples, because a lot of the information is in the examples placed throughout the book.

LATEX is available for most computers, from the PC and Mac to large UNIX and VMS systems. On many university computer clusters you will find that a LATEX installation is available, ready to use. Information on how to access the local LATEX installation should be provided in the Local Guide [5]. If you have problems getting started, ask the person who gave you this booklet.

The scope of this document is not to tell you how to install and set up a LATEX system, but to teach you how to write your documents so that they can be processed by LATEX.

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