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/. Click on New Project and choose an Example project. 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 latex renders it.
To understand how to write bib entries for the bibliography look at the sample .bib file. For a description of the different types of entries, read Bibliographies with BibTeX. It seems a lot but it is easy. Many sites provide references already 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 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:


Copyright: © 207-2020 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.