The purpose of this handout is to get you started in LaTeX on the Sun workstations. LaTeX is used to typeset a document. It is not really a wordprocessor. It is very powerful and almost a standard in Computer Science Departments world wide.

One advantage of using LaTex is that it ``automatically'' pulls the bibliographic references from a BibTex database.

This handout was originally created from the file:

~hyde/Latex/latex-start.tex

1. Resources
   

   A. A Document Preparation System LaTeX, Leslie Lamport, second edition, Addison Wesley, 1994. (about $30. You can order a copy through the bookstore.)
   

   B. Study example .tex files - in ~hyde/Latex directory.

2. Start learning by using sample.tex. Copy sample.tex into your directory.

         hostname% cp  ~hyde/Latex/sample.tex  .

3. To process the .tex file, do the following.

         hostname% latex sample
         hostname% latex sample

   We do it twice because sometimes there are forward references that LaTeX needs to resolve.

   Notice that LaTeX creates .dvi file.

4. To get out of LaTeX (TEX) when you have errors:

        >x <RET>

5. To preview the .dvi file on the screen.

        hostname% xdvi sample &

6. To Print the .dvi file on a laser printer.

        hostname% dvips sample

7. Other Examples in ~hyde/Latex

        letter.tex         a letter
        resume.tex         a resume
        memo.tex           a template for a memo
        biblio.tex         a template for a bilbiography
        tgif-example.tex   including a diagram created by tgif
        bisonmemo.sty      a style file for Bison Scientific memo
        bison-sci-memo.tex a template for Bison Scientific memo