Writing Resources

Typesetting your papers: information on LaTeX.

Typesetting your papers: basic LaTeX instructions.

To get started with Latex, create a file, let's call it myfile.tex, that countains the following:
\documentclass[11pt]{article}  % 11 points is a good size
\usepackage{fullpage}          % more lines and longer lines per page
\begin{document}
\title{Whatever}
\author{your name}
\maketitle                     % generates the title
.....  whatever you want to write.  To divide into sections use something like
\section{Introduction}
\section{Background}
....
\section{Conclusions}
\end{document}
To generate the output run
latex myfile
To preview the output use
xdvi myfile
Repeat this until you are satisfied. To generate the postscript file do
dvips -tletter myfile -o myfile.ps
Convert to pdf by doing
ps2pdf myfile.ps
You can easily generate bibliographic citations, by creating a bibliography file (.bib), specifying in your document what style you want, for instance
\bibliographystyle{plain}
and the name of your bibliography file
\bibliography{mybibliofile}
and running
bibtex myfile
After running bibtex, you need to run latex again twice (latex goes through your file once, so forward references cannot be filled in a single pass).
Copyright: © 2017 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
Department of Computer Science and Engineering. All rights reserved.
Comments to: Maria Gini
Changes and corrections are in red.