pdflatex typically nowadays.
See your local information how to process LaTeX under other operating systems.
You are welcome to tell others about this page and to create a link to it. Instead of providing a live link to this page, I suggest to link to my homepage like I have done above. I have tried my best to be brief as well as accurate, but you will know how hard this is, if you tried to put together a document like this yourself. If you find any mistakes or have comments, please contact me at gobbert@umbc.edu.
In more modern web-parlance, they are mark-up languages, in which
the writer merely indicates the structure of the document
(e.g., "start a new section here" but the actual appearance
is controlled by class and style files (e.g., how a section header
is actually formatted).
Here is an example of the most basic LaTeX source code file
in the plain text file hello.tex:
\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\begin{document}
Hello, world!
\end{document}
LaTeX commands start with a backslash \,
and required arguments are enclosed in curly braces.
The first line chooses the documentclass article, with the
optional arguments in brackets specifying a 12 pt fontsize.
All text that you want to appear in the final output
hello.pdf
appears between the begin and end of the document environment,
in this example the classical "Hello, world!" text.
To obtain the PDF output from the tex input, you call LaTeX
like a compiler for source code programming languages.
A lot of other things could be said here, for instance, about the choice of the name and its Capitalization (to avoid patent infringement on the material latex as in "latex gloves" I refer to the section on "The Game of the Name" in Lamport's book; see below for full reference.
Side-note on the effect of all this: LaTeX has turned math professors into typesetters and publishers like Elsevier and Springer into glorified copy shops: They receive a type-set and fully paginated book from the author, all the publisher does is to have the master copy "photo-copied," send it to the binder, and put a cover around it. But LaTeX has also taken over journals and conference proceedings. Thus, you often have to submit fully functioning LaTeX files at the outset of the submission process. And even if not at the outset, you later have to submit it in that form and thus it is a good idea to use the journal's class and style files from the beginning. And because of this need, it is necessary to learn LaTeX yourself and early on, which is why I created this webpage.
Additionally, let me point out that there are also various other versions of TeX and LaTeX, like AMS-TeX and AMS-LaTeX, propagated by the American Mathematical Society. Those are genuinely different packages than TeX or LaTeX with quite different appearance and partially different commands; I try to avoid using extensions as much as possible.
On the other hand, as LaTeX is freely distributed, there are distributions of it, like teTeX included with Linux distributions. Such distributions include, if they are LaTeX2e compatible, a large number of so-called standard packages like amsmath, cite, graphicx, and many others, all of which are not part of LaTeX, but genuine extensions that provide additional features and functionality.
The books listed below are all appropriate for LaTeX2e. The starting point should always be the book by Leslie Lamport, which is both concise and readable and which explains LaTeX's philosophy well. The price paid for both is lack of completeness, when it comes to advanced features. In this context, "advanced features" include redefining section headers, importing files, and overcoming the struggle with float placement. I have found both the book by Frank Mittelbach et al. as well as the one by George Grätzer useful - in different ways: Mittelbach et al. is organized `horizontally' and discusses material organized by package; I suggest to use it, if you want to dig into the innards of LaTeX2e like redefining section headers or advanced float placement. Compared to that, Grätzer is organized `vertically,' because it discusses tools for one topic from all available sources together. If you need to typeset very complicted formulas or have other problems with the mathematics, I recommend Grätzer because of its well-chosen examples and its organization.
Considering we are in the 21st century, I must mention the huge repository for information and macros put out by the TeX Users Group (abbreviated as TUG). You can find them at http://www.tug.org/. There is a wealth of information available including style files and similar. Or for that matter, I have been rather successful with google searches, if I had specific problems.
Recommended books:
thebibliography environment.
It also contains a wealth of examples of the typsetting of the most
common mathematical constructs like fractions and matrices.
Therefore, on the other hand, you can simply study this sample file
as a quick introduction to LaTeX by reading this tex source code.
For more advanced features, see the Template for Project Reports below.
Click on this link to sample.tex
to download it to your computer.
To process the file, use the following command sequence
at the Unix/Linux prompt:
pdflatex sample.tex
pdflatex sample.tex
Notice that running LaTeX twice is needed to get the automatic
cross-referencing right.
The resulting PDF file sample.pdf should be identical to the one I processed
and that is posted here as sample.pdf.
Files needed to use the template:
The LaTeX source template.tex needs several other
files, namely the bibliography database file
template.bib, the files for the figures,
and the Matlab code (that is used as example how to include code).
The zip file below contains all these needed files.
template.tex
template.bib
poisson_numerical.png
poisson_error.png
figconvorderloglog.png
make_table.m
plot_loglog.m
template.pdf
template.zip
A particular book to point to is Nicholas J. Higham, Handbook of Writing for the Mathematical Sciences, third edition, SIAM, 2020. If you are a Ph.D. student, I strongly recommend that you read this book, because it addresses many question about how publishing works in the sciences.
For a more complete literature list covering also other aspects of mathematics, see my homepage.
After creating an account at
overleaf.com,
you can create a new project on the upper left.
The easiest way is to use Upload Project by dropping a zip file onto the page.
You can use the template.zip
of the project report template above.
Overleaf will automatically start processing LaTeX (and BibTeX)
on the files in the zip archive.
Notice how the resulting PDF file looks exactly like the
PDF file template.pdf
posted above that I processed manually under a Linux operating system!
The narrow left-hand panel of the screen will list the files in the project.
The rest of the screen should show two main portions,
the center one the tex source code and
the right one the processed PDF file.
Overleaf has lots of neat features, like being able to jump to the corresponding source code line in the tex file by double-clicking in the PDF file or navigating between the files with the arrows on the vertical divider between tex and PDF file. This feature is particulary useful for my template file, since that is designed to have you read tex and PDF next to each other simultaneously to see by example, how the output was created from the LaTeX commands. Note that you can make either of these full-screen by clicking on each's upper right corner; reverse this process by clicking on the upper right to split the screen again. It is important that you read the logs for errors and warnings; these can be found by clicking on the document logo to the right of the Recompile button on top of the PDF document.