CSci 4511w: Latex notes

Typesetting your papers: information on LaTeX

The simplest way of getting up to speed on Latex is to use a web based version of latex.
Create a free account at https://www.overleaf.com/. or https://www.sharelatex.com/. The two companies have joined. Overleaf allows multiple users to work on the same files, while sharelatex allows only one user for the free accounts. The systems are quite similar. Click on Create a New Paper (on overleaf) or New Project (on sharelatex). You'll be given a sample latex document, with some text, an image, a table, etc and a bibliography. Modify the text to be what you want and look at how citations are done. To understand how to write bib entries read Bibliographies with BibTeX. It seems a lot but it is easy. Many sites will provide references in bib format.

Resources to learn LaTeX

LaTeX implementations

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[12pt]{article}  % 12 points is a good size, but you can use 11
\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
pdflatex myfile
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 pdflatex again twice (latex goes through your file once, so forward references cannot be filled in a single pass).

If you want include a table, a picture, or an equation in your paper, here are a few quick instructions:


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Department of Computer Science and Engineering. All rights reserved.
Comments to: Maria Gini
Changes and corrections are in red.