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Online tutorials for LaTeX

tug.org.in

62 pointssamratjp19 comments

Every time someone brings up LaTeX I bring up Pandoc. It's an awesome conversion tool written in Haskell that converts between a number of input and output languages, most notably from markdown to LaTeX or a PDF made with LaTeX. I've been using it for all my assignments and papers since I got it, and it's really nice to write in markdown, but be able to use LaTeX for things markdown can't handle.

Link: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/

Emacs Muse is another project that is worth looking at for this kind of work:

http://mwolson.org/projects/EmacsMuse.html

It's basically a markup language not too different from markdown, but which is much more flexible and translates to LaTeX, HTML, PDF, etc.

Yes. It's great to be able to use a LaTeX-formatted equation into a regular Pandoc Markdown document.

BTW, for those wanting to learn more about how to use LaTeX, you might try writing your doc in Markdown, pandoc it into LaTeX, and then look at that LaTeX output in your editor.

I'll add though, that with LaTeX I had to write markup. With Markdown I just write.

I have just started using LaTex for documentation at work, after years struggling with Word, its a real revelation.

I was just forced to start using it for one project, and once I got over the learning curve (which is a lot shorter than it first appears) I love it. Now I'm using it for projects where it is not necessary but is a superior solution to word. The only thing I still really struggle with is the placement of figures exactly where you want them.

  \usepackage{float}
  ...
  \begin{document}
  ...
  \begin{figure}[H]

But LaTeX is often better at determining where a figure should go. There is usually no reason it has to be right after a certain paragraph - books and magazines certainly don't do that. It's just another thing to get used to coming from Word.

My favorite intro to LaTeX still is The Not So Short Introduction To LaTeX:

http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/info/lshort/english/lshort.p...

The TeXBook by Knuth is also good if you want to really get to know TeX (and by extension LaTeX). The writing is engaging and well-paced:

ISBN: 0201134470

I have been looking at LyX. Link: www.lyx.org

It's a WYSIWYM, What You See Is What You Mean editor which uses LaTeX/TeX with a graphical editor.

It's cross-platform, documentation is first rate and IMHO is an excellent contender to Word, let alone writing LaTex.

This one is not online, but really worth a look (beware, it's a work in progress) : http://csweb.ucc.ie/~dongen/LaTeX-and-Friends.pdf

Interesting how they made a Tutorial out of a pdf file. Does anyone know how this is done?

You mean the buttons on the right side? Acrobat can do that. Although it would be fitting if they did it using LaTeX.

I was puzzling if there was a way to do that using LaTeX, but you correct they probably used Acrobat Professional

The creation metadata on the file says it was done with TeX, not Adobe, so probably not.

No, they did not. Take a look at http://www.tug.org.in/tutorial/src/fiscreen.sty.

It says so right on the frontpage: This document is generated from LTEX sources compiled with pdfLTEX v. 14e in an INTEL Pentium III 700 MHz system running Linux kernel version 2.2.14-12. The packages used are hyperref.sty and pdfscreen.sty

I'm pretty sure your TOC is put there automatically if you use pdflatex.

Take a look at http://www.tug.org.in/tutorial/src/fiscreen.sty.

EDIT: It defines the navigation elements as well.

If you want to create nice presentations, I recommend LaTex Beamer: http://latex-beamer.sourceforge.net/

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