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

You can take a systematic approach to learning latex by reading Getting to Grips with LaTeX. Start with Absolute beginners, Document Structure, and Bibliographies with BibTeX. More advanced chapters cover tables, figures, math, and more. You can learn step by step, until you become good at it.
A complete introduction in a single document to the entire Latex is The not so Short Introduction to LaTeX2e Or LaTeX2e in 157 minutes by Tobias Oetiker et al (PDF file).

LaTeX implementations

Visit TUG, the T_EX Users Group site. Here you can get documentation here and visit the pages of different packages.
Look at Getting Started with TeX, LaTeX and Friends for information on installation and documentation.
CTAN, the Comprehensive T_EX Archive Network, is the home of all packages, tools, and documentation.
TeX Live is a good distribution for Unix/Linux and Windows. It is the one used in the Department.
MiKTEX is another good distribution for Windows. Recommended for Windows is proTeXt a MiKTeX-based distribution for Windows.

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:

For tables, look at Tables. For instance, if you want a table to show the timeframe for remaining work, you can do something like this:

\begin{tabular}{l | l}
Topic & Expected completion date \\ \hline
Read related work & November 6 \\
Install software package XYZ & November 20\\
... & ... \\ \hline
\end{tabular}

For pictures, look at Importing Images, which explains how to use the package graphicx. It is not the only package for graphics, but it is widely used and very simple. If you use a latex implementation under Windows that generates directly the pdf file (under linux it is called pdflatex) you can include figures in different formats, including .png and .jpeg. It is always a good idea to include a caption and figure number for your figure. Look at Floats, figures, and captions for how to do it. For example,
```
\documentclass[12pt]{article} 
\usepackage{graphicx}
....
\begin{document}
...
\begin{figure}[ht]
\includegraphics[width=4in]{mypicture.eps}
\caption{\label{mypict} This is a sample picture}
\end{figure}
```
For equations look at Mathematics - Part 1. To include the equation in the text use $ ... $, to produce it on a separate line without an equation number use \[...\], to produce it on a separate line with an equation number use \begin{equation} ...\end{equation}. For instance, $x^2$ will produce x² in the text, \[ x^2 \] will produce x² on a separate line with no equation number. If you need to use special symbols (greek letters, math symbols, arrows, etc) you can find a list at https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Special_Characters and in other places. For more advanced use of math look at Mathematics - Part 2.
For references, you need to use bibtex, which allows to specify references of different types (journal article, book, conference paper, technical report or thesis, etc). You can look at Bibliographies with BibTeX for details on how to do bibliographies in Latex.