LaTeX: Installation
To compose LaTeX documents, you need an editor to compile documents and a TeX implementation. There are many editors*. You may choose one of them. I prefer to use TeXworks. I give some links of the editor and TeX implementations for different OS types.
*A list of editors: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_TeX_editors
Editor
- TeXworks 4.5: for Windows, Mac, and some Linux distributions
Link: http://www.tug.org/texworks/#Getting_TeXworks
Implementation
- MikTex 2.9: for Windows OS
Link: http://miktex.org/download (There are several choices depending on your machine.)
- MacTeX 2014: for Mac OS
Link: http://www.tug.org/mactex
- For Linux OS, see http://miktex.org/howto/build-unx
For more information, see http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Installation
LaTeX: Basics
LaTeX seems very inconvenient when you first meet it. However, you will find yourself using it more than other word processing programs once you are familiar with the language. It is not only a nice tool to typeset equations but also a smart text editing tool. You will rarely concern about the layout of your document. It automatically places texts and figures. You don't have to manually adjust font size and types for each section/subsection/subsub... title. Especially, if you plan to go to grad school, learning LaTeX earlier will help you to reduce the time for settlement.
You may see http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Basics if you want to know how LaTeX works. Is it too long? Here is a quick-start guide. You can find this website for almost everything about LaTeX.
The skeleton code to compose a latex document is:
\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
(Add text here)
\end{document}
You will need some packages to use more functions. For this class, I think the below packages will be enough. You can add more packages if you need. Here is a list of useful packages: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Package_Reference
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{amsmath,amssymb,amsthm,latexsym,paralist}
\begin{document}
(Add text here)
\end{document}
Now compile the latex file. If you use TeXworks, press Ctrl+T (or press the green arrow button at the left-upper corner). It may need installations of the packages. After installing all packages, you can produce a pdf file.
Here are some tips for editing (for writing text between the document block).
- New line: \\
- Mathematical expressions should be in between a pair of $ symbols. ex) $x=3$.
- Math symbols: see the documents posted on the course website.
- Bold face: \textbf{text here}
- Italics: \textit{text here}
- No indent after a new line: \noindent