tex and l tex document preparation toolspjh/modules/current/06991/lectures/latex/latex1_slides.pdfa...

06-06991 – Research Skills

TEX and LATEX

Document preparation tools

This lecture will introduce software necessary to produce documents using

LATEX in the School of Computer Science. It will also show the basics of producing a

first LATEX document.


1 - TeX and LaTeX - 1 1

What is TEX?

A powerful typesetting system designed for scientific documents.

Created by Donald Knuth in reaction to the poor phototypesetting of the second edition of his The Art of Computer Programming.

Intended to

– allow production of books with reasonable effort

– give same result on all computers now and in the future



What Knuth was setting

But the printing technology of the day relied on casting single letters …



Setting and casting type

Books were printed from many individual letters:

“Ordinary” text could be set by machine but Knuth’s

text was not “ordinary”.



Setting and casting type

Books were set by essentially typing the text on a

Monotype type setter:

This produced instructions on

paper tape to a casting machine:

Monotype caster in action (but

with the volume turned down)

Knuth supplied the commands to

the caster.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SPsBQKSz04

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SPsBQKSz04



What is TEX?

Its particular strengths are in:

– spacing in setting mathematics

– its automatic line breaking/justification algorithm

It consists of about 300 macros:

Example: A trivial TEX document

Hello! \end



Advantages of TEX

Flexibility

Full-power programming language allows:

– automation of typesetting

– addition of macros built from primitive TEX macros

Nicer output -

– especially for maths

– Produces nice paragraphs, formulas, tables, …

Easy global changes



Advantages of TEX

Well-programmed - Knuth’s literate programming

Architecture independent

– works the same on any hardware/OS

Free

Extended to use any PostScript font

Can incorporate PostScript code to add fancy graphics and effects, e.g. rotating and scaling text, including graphic objects



Disadvantages of TEX

TEX is not WYSIWYG

Designed for traditional typesetting

– fancy typesetting might get complicated and cumbersome.

Not easy to learn

– needs to memorize many commands but a lot of good documentation is available.



What is LATEX?

A set of TEX macros to make typesetting easier

TEX has 300 primitive commands

So-called Plain TEX defines 600 basic macros

LATEX is much larger, containing:

– different structuring macros for typesetting different types of documents: letter, article, report, book, ...

– packages – user-defined macros bundles for specific tasks, e.g. creating appendices.



Ubiquity of LATEX

LATEX has been adopted by scientific and technical publishers as the format to receive manuscripts because LATEX:

– is widely available

– because the style of documents can be easily changed by changing parameters

– incorporating multiple documents/chapters is very easy

– indexes, reference lists etc. are easy to create



LATEX2e

Many incompatible versions of LATEX were developed, causing problems for system maintainers (who had to keep several versions running).

It wasn’t always clear what version a package had been written for.

LATEX2e is an attempt at standardisation.

It is easy to spot a LATEX2e document: it starts with \documentclass – not \documentstyle.



What does LATEX do?

LATEX also includes:

– facility to automatically produce a table of contents, list of figures, list of tables, footnotes, header, title page, bibliography

– font management macros, e.g. \textit \large, \textsc

– easy creation of tables

– easy-to-use macros for complex mathematical formulas

– excellent cross-referencing macros



Developing a LATEX document

Step 0: Ensure that your .login file has LATEX enabled.

Step 1: Prepare an input file for LATEX using your favourite editor.

The input file should be plain text, with .tex as its extension, eg: test1.tex

OR: Use Texmaker under linux (see handout)




Step 2: Run LATEX under Unix with your input file as the argument to the command, eg:

latex test1.tex

If errors are reported, return to Step 1 and correct them; otherwise:

LATEX will have produced an output file with the extension .dvi, eg: test1.dvi




Step 3: Convert the .dvi output into a form suitable for viewing or driving a PostScript printer, for instance using the translator:

xdvi test1.dvi

dvips will produce an PostScript file with the extension ps, eg: test1.ps

or dvipdf test1.dvi

Step 4: Print the PostScript file on your chosen printer, eg:

lpr –Prothko test1.{ps,pdf}



A simple LATEX document - 1

\documentclass[12pt]{article}

% Use PS palatino fonts \usepackage{palatino}

\begin{document}

Hello!

\end{document}

Compulsory arguments of macros are enclosed in { }

Optional arguments are enclosed in [ ]




Commands can have a number of optional arguments.

At most one compulsory argument is allowed for each command and follows optional arguments.

The macro \documentclass{} is the first thing you have to write. Its only mandatory argument is the type of document. Its optional argument is a list of comma-separated options

e.g. a4paper, 1Opt,11pt,12pt, landscape,...




The macro \usepackage{<package-name>} loads additional macros from the file:

<package-name>.sty

Watch out for reserved characters.

These have to be represented by:

# \# $ \$

% \% & \&

_ \_ \ $\backslash$



A simple LATEX article - 1

\documentclass[12pt]{article}

% The document preamble

\usepackage{times} % Use PS times fonts

% Details of the titlepage

\title{A Very \textsc{Simple} Document Indeed}

\author{\textit{W. Clinton and M. Lewinsky}}

\date{\today} % Use the system date




\begin{document}

\maketitle

\section{Introduction}

This is the first paragraph.

Paragraphs must end with an empty line this like this.

This is another paragraph.

Let's force a line break: \\

Now, we’d like to continue with this paragraph.




\noindent This is a non-indented paragraph.

\subsection{Aim of this lecture}

Blah, \dots %'\dots' makes 3 nice dots

A footnote looks

this \footnote{I'm a footnote.}

\section{Conclusion}

This is it! Easy!!!

\end{document}



LATEX tables - 1

Each table begins with: \begin{tabular}{<table-specification>}

Table specification “lcr” means:

– 3 columns

– 1st column: left justified

– 2nd column: centred

– 3rd column: right justified

Column entries separated by “&” and lines ended by “\\”



LATEX tables - 2

% A Simple Table

\begin{tabular}{lcr}

Date & : & \today \\

Time & : & 3 p.m. \\

Venue & : & Computer Science\\

\end{tabular}



LATEX tables - 3

The table specification in the following example uses “|” to separate each column by a vertical line \begin{tabular}{|c|p{8cm}|}

– the first column is centered.

– the second column is justified and is 8 cm wide.

Horizontal lines in the table are specified by adding \hline after the line ending command “\\”.



LATEX tables - 4

% A table with border and

% fixed column width

\begin{tabular}{|c|p{8cm}|}\hline

\textbf Phrasal Verb & \textbf Meaning \\ \hline

fish for & If you {\textbf fish for}

information or praise, you try

and get it from someone in an

indirect way. \\ \hline

% one entry omitted from slide

\end{tabular}



Including figures - 1

The first thing is, of course, to have a figure to insert.

\begin{figure}[hbpt]

\begin{verbatim}

procedure CreateEntry (NextTerm : Termptr;

CopyEntry : EntryRec);

end; {of CreateEntry}

\end{verbatim}

\caption{Pascal algorithm}

\label{pascal_alg}

\end{figure}




What does this mean?

\begin{figure}[hbpt]

The following text is a figure.

h: place here if there is room

b: place at the bottom of a text page

p: place on a “page of floats”

t: place at top of next text page

The figure isn’t

inserted at exactly

the point in the text

where this command

is placed.




What do these mean?

\caption{Pascal algorithm}

The text that will appear with the figure. Note, you don’t have to include (e.g.) “Figure 2”

\label{pascal_alg}

A label by which we can refer to this figure within the document.




We are certain to want to refer to figures from within our text, but:

– we may add more figures or remove figures

– we may move the order of figures around

To avoid manually renumbering figures, we use in the text:

...given in Figure~\ref{pascal_alg}.

This automatically adds (usually) a number into the text.



Graphics formats - 1

What if your figure is not text – e.g. a photo or line drawing?

Resolution-independent vector graphics, e.g.

– EPS – Encapsulated PostScript

– WMF – Windows Meta File

for (e.g.)

– block diagrams

– flow charts

– diagrams with text labels




Pixel-based raster-graphic formats, e.g.

– PNG – Portable Network Graphics

– TIFF – Tagged Image File Format

– JPEG – [Joint Photographic Experts Group]

– GIF – Graphics Interchange Format

for (e.g.)

– screen shots

– photos

– scanned images of pages




Note JPEG and GIF are “lossy” compression formats – continual editing can degrade the images.

Prefer non-lossy formats, e.g. PNG.

Note: stretching JPEGs doesn’t work well!

but stretching vector

graphic images does



Adding a PostScript figure - 1

Adding a PostScript file is only a little more complicated than adding a normal figure.

Step 1: Prepare a graphic using your favourite package

Step 2: Save or convert your graphic in a suitable format, eg:

repr_terms.pdf



Adding a PostScript figure - 2

In the preamble, add the following: \usepackage{graphicx}

Then the illustration can be added to your text by using \begin{figure} as before: \begin{figure}

\includegraphics{repr_terms}

\caption{PDF diagram}

\label{pdf_diagram}

\end{figure}



What to do next

Copies of the two LATEX documents used in the lecture are available from the module web page as: example1.tex

example2.tex

Make copies of these and use your copies to:

– create .dvi files

– create .ps or .pdf files

– print .ps or .pdf files to a printer

– edit the files to add more text and features.



Sources of further information

There are numerous sources of information about LATEX, ranging from the introductory to the obscure.

The best places to start are on the School’s

– local guide to using LATEX

and

– The Not So Short Introduction to LATEX2e

(both linked from the module web page).

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