How to write with LaTeX

First of all, what’s LaTeX ?

LaTeX is the extension of TeX a language written by Donald Knuth, who was disappointed by the way his mathematical research were published. (you can imagine, integrals, sum symbols, greek letters, fraction, roots, …). Anyway, LaTeX was born : it’s was open, free, and first used by scientific community. These days anyone can used it to write his documents (even a simple letter). LaTeX is typographically powerful (more than M$-word).

How to use LaTeX ?

What do you need ? For my part, i use GNU/Linux. But LaTeX exists on M$-WINDOW$. Two essentiel things :

1. A compiler
2. An Editor
3. Acrobat Reader

On Windows : a free distro is MIKTEX, you can download it here. For beginners, the small package is enough. For the editor, there are WinEdt (shareware) and TeXnicenter (google to find it) (freeware).

On GNU/Linux, normally a latex compiler is given, but you can look for tetex-RPMs. A nice site is this one. TeTeX has a lot of packages (document classes, fonts, …). Then for the editor, you can download Kile. I think it’s the most interesting one because it’s completion-editor (this means that if you type the word class, the editor invites you to complete it with a list of word in its database).

Something else …

To help you start, this is an example of the “Hello world”

\documentclass{article}

\begin{document}

Hello world.

\end{document}

Where to find docs ?

Anywhere on the Net. For beginners, just type “LaTeX tutorial” for example. I advice you “the not so short introduction to latex” a interesting pdf document.

What’s next ?

For those who want to fulfill the experiment, you can download new packages here.