LaTeX Information

This page contains lots of information about LaTeX (pronounced "lah-tek"), which is a document typsetting markup language. It produces beautiful documents, and is particularly nice for writing mathematical formulas and equations. As it is a markup language, you can write and view .tex files with any text editor, and you can compile .tex files to a variety of useful formats, including PDF, PostScript, DVI, and HTML. It also has very nice integrated bibliography support through BibTex.

What follows is a list of PDFs and web links to references, tutorials, and other materials pertaining to learning or using TeX/LaTeX. I did not create any of them, but I have found many of them to be useful. If you are looking for further information, simply type "latex" into any search engine (use extreme caution with Google Images, though).

A good place to get started is this wiki-"book".

Links to LaTeX tutorials:

CTAN: the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network is a massive collection of TeX and LaTeX related information. There are some intro and tutorial links on the main page, but one of the more useful features is the search page which lets you search the massive documentation archives. This can be very useful for finding the correct useage of a command, for example. Their what is TeX page contains a nice introduction to LaTeX, including a list of reasons why it's worth switching away from a WYSIWYG word processor.
CTAN also has a nice list of what not to do in latex.

Getting Started with LaTeX and A LaTeX Tutorial are also good introductory tutorials you can read through to get started using LaTeX.

Hypertext Help with Latex is a very nice LaTeX command reference; if you're looking for the correct useage of a particular command, this is a good site to check.

LaTeX References:

A latex quick-reference "cheetsheat"; print double sided. (PDF)

The Comprehensive LaTeX Symbol List (PDF)

The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX (PDF)

Documeuntation for the Algorithms package (a nice package for writing computer algorithms, particularly pseudo-code) (PDF)

Getting Latex:

These days, it's easy to use LaTeX through your browser with tools like overleaf.com ; it's a cloud hosted platform that allows for easy colaboration, though the standard caveats for any kind of free cloud service apply.

If you want to be able to build tex documents natively, almost any Linux distro will have LaTeX packages available; check your package manager. TexLive is probably what you will wind up with; it will give you a full suite of command line tools. If you want an GUI, you'll need to install something else as well.

TeXstudio and MikTex. are cross-platform (Linux, OSX, MSWindows), open source IDEs for creating and editing LaTeX documents. Like most IDEs, it can be nice to use if you're not comfortable with command line tools and text editors. If you're already a wizard using ViM or Emacs, the lack of advanced functionality in the built-in text editor may slow you down. Again, most Linux distros will have this in their package manager; with Windows or OSX, you'll need to grab it directly from sourceforge.

If you use OSX, you can also take a look at TeXShop or iTeXMac as IDEs, or install the CLI tools using HomeBrew.

If you use Windows, you may want to install Linux Subsystem for Windows (see Microsoft's install guide for details), and then install the CLI tools with a package manager as normal.