The l2h help pages |
|
© Leon van Dommelen |
|
The latest version of this document is online at
eng.famu.fsu.edu or at
dommelen.net.
Introduction to LaTeX
After you have installed l2h, follow the instructions
on how to get started.
This will allow you to select an example document "index.tex"
and allow you to load it in an editor.
The first thing is to read completely through that example document
using the editor window. This is a complete document. It will show
you what LaTeX is all about. And how to do every major step in
preparing a document.
Do not worry too much about details yet. If you later want to know
how to do italics, bold, a figure, a table, etc., just search through
the example with your editor's search function. If you already
deleted parts of the example, you can find intact copies on web page
examples.html. Use your browser's
search function on them (try pressing f while holding Ctrl).
After reading through the example, go to the l2h menu window and press
the "p" key in it when active. This will create a finished pdf
document called "index.pdf". Look at this document and compare what
you see there with what you saw in index.tex. (To view index.pdf,
either press the "P" key in the l2h menu or, in the example folder,
right-click index.pdf and select a suitable viewer.)
After you have a general idea how the contents of index.tex relates to
the final document, look at the links below for more in-depth
information. The first links are the ones you will probably want to
look at first, in my opinion.
-
Editors. See editors.html for editors
suitable to create LaTeX documents.
-
Basics. See
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Basics for some basic aspects
of LaTeX that you have to know, like the structure of the input
document. Much of it you may already recognize from looking at the
l2h example.
-
Errors while running LaTeX. If the build-in l2h help
on errors
and warnings is not enough, try
-
Scientific line and contour plots.
See plots.html
-
Images (plots, photographs, etc.)
See images.html.
-
Page (and other) numbers.
See pagenos.html.
-
Adding or removing whitespace: use say "\hspace*{0.5in}" (0.5 inch
horizontal) or "\vspace*{1in}" (1 inch vertical). Negative amounts
are OK. Single spaces: use "~" for a fixed (no line-break) space, or
"\ " for where a space disappears behind a latex command. See the
examples.
-
"Build-in" names.
See
http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=fixnam
-
Tables. See
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Tables for more info than is in
the example.
-
Mathematical symbols, including Greek ones.
See
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Mathematics#List_of_Mathematical_Symbols.
and
the
comprehensive symbol list.
-
Bibliographical references. See
- natbib.pdf
- citeref/index.html (links to citations.)
-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BibTeX
-
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Bibliography_Management
-
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/More_Bibliographies
for more info than you can find in the example and the
"references.bib" file in its folder.
-
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX. Look here first for a definite
discussion of each aspect of LaTeX. It can be somewhat overwhelming
at times, however.
-
FAQ.
Frequently asked questions list. May give you more options than the reference
above.
-
Wenguang Wang's
LaTeX Introduction
-
Getting to Grips
with LaTeX.
-
A
Simplified Introduction to LaTeX.
-
The Not So Short
Introduction to LaTeX2e.
-
Harvard Guide to LaTeX.