Introduction

TeX is a typesetting system designed and mostly written by Donald Knuth. Together with the METAFONT language for font description and the Computer Modern family of typefaces, it was designed with two main goals in mind: to allow anybody to produce high-quality books using a reasonable amount of effort, and to provide a system that would give the exact same results on all computers, now and in the future. Within the typesetting system, its name is formatted as TeX.

TeX is one popular means by which to typeset complex mathematical formulae; it has been noted as one of the most sophisticated digital typographical systems in the world. TeX is popular in academia, especially in mathematics, computer science, engineering, and physics. It has largely displaced Unix troff, the other favored formatter, in many Unix installations, which use both for different purposes. It is now also being used for many other typesetting tasks, especially in the form of LaTeX and other template packages.

The widely-used MIME type for TeX is application/x-tex. TeX is free software.

CSE-Supported Implementations

TeX is a reference standard that must be translated into implementations for practical use. CSE supports these TeX implementations:

• TeX Live
• teTeX (deprecated)

You may use either implementation. As of May 2006, teTeX is no longer actively maintained. teTeX developer Thomas Esser recommends using TeX Live as the replacement of teTeX.

Operations

Examples

Download these files to your home directory on nickelback.
gunzip, tar -xvf the files.
cd into the tar directory, then run make to create PDF files.

1. Presentation slides
   1. "digital" letterhead

Notes

1. Some people have been having problems with some of the TeX programs: either with certain style files not being found, or with certain fonts not being found (and causing MetaFont to be invoked). The problems are almost always caused by environment variables.

   If you do not have your own font directory, then do not set TEXFONTS, TEXPK, or XDVIFONTS -- the programs know where all the default fonts are (including the hlatex ones). If you do have your own fonts, set the variable as follows:

   setenv VARIABLE /my/font/dir:
   

   (i.e. make sure to include the trailing colon, which tells the programs to use their default paths as well as the ones you specify).

   Similarly for TEXINPUTS, only set it if you have your own directory of styles, and be sure to include a trailing colon.

2. Prevent LaTeX from indenting paragraphs by beginning the paragraph with the control sequence \noindent:

   http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~dwilkins/LaTeXPrimer/WhiteSpace.html

3. Special characters escaping, and also:" Quotation marks: The usual double quotation marks don't come out correctly in TeX. To get correct double quotes, surround the quoted phrase by a left and a right pair of single quotes (``TeX'')."

   http://www.math.uiuc.edu/~hildebr/tex/course/intro1.html

4. In "text mode" of the LaTeX typesetting language a stand-alone tilde can be obtained with \~{} and for use as a diacritics, e.g., like \~{n} rendering "ñ". In "math mode" a stand-alone tilde can be written as \tilde{~} and as diacritics, e.g., \tilde{x}:

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilde, see Section 'Computer languages'.

5. If you are processing your .tex file directly to .dvi (which you can do in emacs with C-c C-f in latex-mode), then you can simply hit 'reread' in the xdvi viewer to update if there is a new .dvi file.(C-c C-v to launch xdvi from emacs, but you must set your tex-dvi-view-command to "xdvi" for this to work).
6. To insert a figure: use the graphicx package and then use this line between the \begin{figure} and \end{figure}:

   \centerline{\includegraphics{FIG}}
   

   where "FIG" is the .pdf containing the image.
7. Given input file handout.pdf, print two slides per page in portrait orientation:

   
   % pdfnup --nup "1x2" --offset ".25cm .25cm" --delta ".25cm .5cm" --no-landscape --frame true --scale 0.9 handout.pdf
   
   

References

General

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX
3. http://www.latex-project.org/
4. http://itexmac.sourceforge.net/
5. http://www.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/support/tth/dist/

Content Management

1. http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/
2. General bootstrapping document: http://www.jgsee.kmutt.ac.th/exell/General/LaTeX.html#figures
3. Figures: http://www-hermes.desy.de/latex/ltx-225.html
4. Graphics: http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~pmg26/hpage/teaching/graphics_LaTeX.html
5. Appendices: http://amath.colorado.edu/documentation/LaTeX/basics/steps/AppAtex.html
6. Thesis Format: http://web.mit.edu/olh/Latex/thes-latex.html
7. UIUC Introduction to LaTeX: http://www.math.uiuc.edu/~hildebr/tex/course/
8. Whitespace: http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~dwilkins/LaTeXPrimer/WhiteSpace.html
9. Coffee Stains: http://hanno-rein.de/archives/349

Packages

1. pdfjam: http://www.warwick.ac.uk/go/pdfjam
2. pgf: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pgf/
3. xcolor: https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=92412&package_id=...