Help for LaTeX

Help for LaTeX

Latex Tricks

While writing my thesis, I did experience quite a few problems when typesetting the manuscript with LaTeX. A plain search on latex will usually return a couple of thousands of answers ranging from outdated pages, undocumented packages, as well as latex items you might not be looking for... Therefore, I decided to sumarize some information I collected that could be useful for other people.

1- Usefull websites

2- Usefull sofware

3- Documentation available on this server

4- Packages I used

5- Creating a PDF file with LaTeX

1- Usefull websites http://www-h.eng.cam.ac.uk/help/tpl/textprocessing/, Text Processing using LaTeX at the Department of Enginering of the University of Cambridge. Very good source of information, documentation on hundreds of packages, well-organized, and well maintained... http://www.giss.nasa.gov/latex/, Latex manual. Contains manuals and lists of LaTeX commands. Pretty useful if you need to refresh your memory. These help files are meant to provide reference information for those with some familiarity with LaTeX. They are not an introduction or tutorial. I do have a mirror here http://www.tug.org/applications/hyperref/manual.html, Documentation for the hyperref package. http://www.physics.otago.ac.nz/bec2/bmcd/pdf/, PDF Output from LaTeX.

Left headings Right headings Sumaries Side captions Figures side by side

2- Usefull sofware Emacs... Does everything, edit LaTeX file, spellchecking, coffee... Flyspell: on the fly spellchecking for emacs: extremely useful. Kile: LaTeX source editor - TeX shell - Gnuplot front end for KDE 3. I did not use this software to write my thesis because I discovered it very late in the process of writing. However, I have used it since and I find it more convenient than emacs, and you DO keep control on the LaTeX source. Xmgrace: WYSIWYG 2D plotting tool for the X Window System and M*tif. That's what I use for all my plots. By the way, it runs on windows as well (it's part of cygwin). Xfig: I use this figures. It's basic but it works and figures are clean. It's also part of cygwin on M$ windows. Jabref: graphical frontend to manage BibTeX databases. I find it great, no need to dig into BibTeX files, it does a very good job at maintaining a database, searching... It's in java so it should work on any platform.