Document Preparation using LaTeX

Piyush P Kurur

January 12, 2015

History

How were documents prepared ?

There are two parties

  • Author: who cares about the content
  • Typesetter: who cares about the form

What is involved in type setting?

  • Font selection
  • How to break lines in a paragraph?
  • How to fit paragraphs in to pages?
  • How to hyphenate words?
  • Type setting math is a problem in itself.

You need professional help.

What is wrong with WYSIWYG

  • Authors are forced to be poor typesetters
  • What if you want to change the style?
    • Journal 1 rejected now sending to Journal 2

If you start using for complicated document, you will need professional help.

LaTeX saves.

  • TeX is a macro language designed by Donald Knuth
  • Specifically designed to support complicated math type setting.
  • PlainTeX is a set of macros which contains common macros
  • LaTeX is a "library" written to ease documents.
  • As author you care about the logical structure not the looks.

LaTeX can be used for

LaTeX provides styles for writing

  • papers, books, letters etc
  • creating a0 sized Posters
  • presentations (beamer)

Why it matters?

  • Generates documents with high quality type setting,
  • Authors needs to worry about content not style,
  • Auto-generation of equation numbers, cross reference,
  • Fantastic Math support.

LaTeX Preliminaries.

The process

  • Create a plain text file with .tex extension
  • Compile it with the latex command
  • Or with pdflatex to get pdf

Example

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
blah blah bluhm $\alpha^2 + \int f(x) dx$
\end{document}

Labeling and refering

\begin{equation}
    E = m c ^2 \label{eq-mass-energy}
\end{equation}
...
From \emph{Einstein's equation of mass} and energy \ref{eq-mass-energy} we
can calculate the energy in the reactor

Math

  • Inline using $(\alpha + \beta)^2$

  • Display math

\[
    \sum_{i=1}^n i = \frac{n (n - 1)}{2}
\]
  • Equations with numbers
\begin{equation}
E = m c ^2 \label{eq-mass-energy}
\end{equation}

Packages

  • AMS packages (amssym, amsthm, amsmath)
  • tikz/pgf: High quality vector graphics
  • Think of any task and there is a package for it (use google)

Some styles

  • article
  • report, book
  • letter
  • beamer : presentations

n0bee mistakes

  • Explicitly line breaking
    • Latex ignores your line breaks and figures out the right place to break
    • Break paragraph with an empty line

  • labeling equations as eq-1 eq-2 etc

  • confusing \emph and \it or $$

  • Commas in document and math

Good Latex style.

  • Think in terms of document logic not typesetting.
    • this is a chapter, this a theorem, this an equation
    • not this is large bold font, indent and italicise, math and number
  • Do not mix math and English.
Let $U$, $V$ and $W$ be three vector spaces.

instead of

Let $U,V$ and $W$ be vector spaces.
  • Do not over do math. With great powers come greater responsibilities