UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH

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1 L A TEX SHORT COURSE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH 1. Overview By the end of this short course you should be reasonably comfortable with the L A TEX typesetting system, using WinEdt as a front-end and editor. You should be making good use of the standard features of L A TEX, including the sectioning commands, lists and tables, type-setting mathematics, and theorem-like environments. Where appropriate, you should also be able to make use of the cross-referencing facilities provided by L A TEX, including references to numbered equations and sections, and inclusion of a numbered list of references. You should also be happy about including graphical output in your documents Resources. Most people learn how to use L A TEX by typing documents, looking at a manual as needed. I hope you will be happy to pick up L A TEX in this kind of way. The manual I recommend (at least initially) is the Not So Short Introduction to L A TEX2e [4]. The file linalgnotes.tex is a sample L A TEX file, with many comments, which you can use as a crib for looking up how to do things if you can t find what you re looking for in [4]. In order to develop your L A TEX skills, you are strongly encouraged to type a 2 3-page document during the lab session. The task is purely secretarial in nature: you are presented with a PDF file, and must try to write a L A TEX file that will reproduce it. To get started, download the files: linalgnotes.tex, preamble.tex, slide example.tex, nss new.pdf, amsldoc.pdf, equivreln.pdf. Now open WinEdt. 2. Getting started 2.1. WinEdt. You will be using the editor WinEdt to generate your L A TEX documents. The following is a very brief outline of WinEdt. Please experiment with opening the files you ve just downloaded and/or creating some new ones of your own as you read over this subsection. The basic features of WinEdt will probably be familiar from other editors you have used. First of all, to start a new document, click on File and New Date: Updated: December 2,

2 2 UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH (or use the keyboard short-cut Ctrl+N). To modify an existing document select Open from the same menu (or use the short-cut Ctrl+O). Don t forget regularly to save your work (Ctrl+S, or Save from the File menu). If you ve created a new document, you ll have to use Save as... to give it a suitable name. One useful feature of WinEdt is the following. Say you re working on file A.tex, and you want to check something in file B.tex. Without quitting A.tex, you can open B.tex, and will appear in a second tab. This allows you to work on two files at once; in particular you can cut and paste text from A.tex to B.tex an vice versa. These tabs can be closed individually from the File menu (or use Ctrl+F4). Under the Edit and Search menus you will find standard and reasonably self-explanatory tools for editing and searching your document. The Insert menu contains some tools that help you to typeset with L A TEX; you can explore these for yourself as the course progresses. We shall not have much use for the Document or Project menus. The Tools menu allows you to access some spell-checking programs: it is worth using these on finished documents, as long as you remember that this spellchecker thinks that American spellings are correct. The Σ button below Tools sets up a GUI (graphical user interface) for commonly used L A TEX symbols; so, for example, when you want to get L A TEX to generate an α you can just select this symbol from the Greek menu which appears between the standard tool-bar and the document. I personally am used to typing everything (e.g., \alpha) but I can see that this GUI system has its advantages, especially at the beginning. Similarly, below Accessories there are buttons that give you the L A TEX commands for bold, italic and teletype fonts. The other buttons we shall be using are the one marked PDFLATEX (on the top row of buttons on the tool bar, towards the right-hand end) and the button with the Adobe Acrobat logo (a curly triangle) on it, just below the PDFLATEX button. The first of these runs the L A TEX processor on the source-file and attempts to produce a PDF file. The second allows you to view (and hence print) the PDF file. I suggest that you open a document (either one of the L A TEX files you have just downloaded, or a new one) and play around with some of these features until you feel confident that you are able to use WinEdt. Notice that if you open one of the L A TEX files, then WinEdt automatically colours some of the characters and symbols that appear. The rationale for this will make much more sense when you know a bit more about L A TEX; then you will see that this colouring is very helpful in checking for possible programming errors. As set up in the labs, you may get an error message when you quit WinEdt. Just click Ignore when this happens Basic structure of L A TEX. I suggest that you now read through of the Not so short guide [4] (either new or old version). This will give you an overview of how typesetting with L A TEX works. The L A TEX files you have downloaded should help to illustrate some of the points made here. In particular, I have put lots of comments in linalgnotes.tex, including page references to the relevant pages or sections of [3].

3 LATEX SHORT COURSE Texing a document. Open linalgnotes.tex and convert it into a beautiful PDF document as follows: Click on the PDFLATEX icon. This directs the processor to convert the source-file to PDF. You will see a window open and some text appear in this window this is the processor s log. If there are no errors in the source-file, this window will disappear again. The processor will grind to a halt with an error message in the log window if there is anything wrong with the source file. Assuming that your document is OK, the Acrobat button immediately below will appear in colour (red); click this button to fire up the Acrobat Reader, which will automatically select the output of the file you ve just processed. This two-step procedure will be the same for all the documents that you will be producing with L A TEX and WinEdt. Note that if your document contains cross-references and/or a bibliography, you will have to run L A TEX at least twice for them to come out right. This procedure is different from that outlined in 1.5 of [3] and [4], which is more adapted to Unix platforms Errors. The colour-coding that WinEdt does automatically makes it relatively easy to spot the more common coding errors even as you are typing. If you process a file with an error in it, the processing will stop, there will be no PDF file, and the log window will show the line of the source-file that it didn t like. A nice feature of WinEdt is that if you now type e followed by Enter, you will find yourself back in the source-file, with the bad line highlighted. In general, the error messages are not too helpful, but you will soon become familiar with the more common ones. Let s go into this process of error-correcting in a little more detail. You ve typed up a L A TEX source-file and have started to tex it. The log window comes up with an error. You return to your source and correct the error. What next? You have a couple of options. It is often worth returning to the log window and hitting Enter; this will tell the processor to carry on as best it can, ignoring the error. Chances are, it will come up with another error, later on, that you will also be able to correct, and so on until it reaches the end of your source-file. Then, texing again, you should have a file free of errors which you ll be able to view. Sometimes, however, an error will have such far-reaching (bad) consequences that the above is not a sensible way to proceed. Then you can quit the processing by typing x followed by Enter in the log window Warning: conflicts between Acrobat and L A TEX. Sometimes, while working on a document and I confess, I am not sure exactly when this happens you will get an error message to the effect that L A TEX cannot write to the PDF file, or the Acrobat Reader is unable to open it. If this happens, check if there is an open log file somewhere (i.e. the processor thinks it s still working on the file) and hit Enter. If this doesn t work, then quit the Acrobat Reader, or at least close the file: click the lower of the two crosses in the top right-hand corner. If this still doesn t clear the problem, save your work, quit WinEdt and start again.

4 4 UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH I have only encountered these difficulties when the document has already been texed at least once and the acrobat reader has already been fired up. 3. Practice This short assignment is intended to get you used to the idea of typesetting using L A TEX. You will type a L A TEX source-file which generates PDF output similar to that of a given file How to get started. Download equivreln.pdf from the web. The goal today is to type a L A TEX document whose output closely resembles this document. To get started, copy preamble.tex into a new file and give it a suitable name. Now you can start typing this document, referring to [4, Chapters 2 3] and/or linalgnotes.tex as needed. Don t be discouraged if it seems to go very slowly to begin with Tips. The main tip is: let L A TEX do all the hard work! The whole point of this typesetting system is that it has many features that make typesetting mathematical documents easy of course, it may take some practice before you appreciate just how easy L A TEX can be... The more you use the features that L A TEX offers, the better your documents will look, and the less trouble you will have in producing them. Here are some of the features of L A TEX which you will find yourself using all the time most of them are available from the Insert menu on the WinEdt toolbar. Lists and so on: use the list-making environments provided by L A TEX [4, ]. Mathematics in text: enclose with dollar signs: $...$. Displayed equations: use \begin{equation*}...\end{equation*} Numbered equations: use \begin{equation}...\end{equation}. Paragraphs: just leave a blank line. Sections and subsections: use \section{...}, \subsection{...}. Theorem-like structures: use the environments provided by the standard preamble. Cross-referencing: this is one of the coolest features offered by L A TEX see linalgnotes.tex for examples or [3, 4, 2.8]. 4. Including Graphics The pdflatex package allows the inclusion of filename.jpg by the sequence of commands begin{figure}\label{} \begin{center} \includegraphics[width=0.5\textwidth]{filename} \end{center} \caption{} \end{figure}

5 LATEX SHORT COURSE 5 Here \label gives you the chance to label your figure (for cross-referencing) and \caption will generate a caption for it. Both are optional but highly recommended. It is essential to have the line \usepackage[pdftex]{graphicx} in your preamble for the above to work. See Chapter 4 of [4] for more details on these commands. Note, however, that that Chapter concentrates on the inclusion of encapsulated postscript graphics, rather than jpg files. 5. Further topics It will be apparent from [4] that a lot more can be done with L A TEX than we have described here. For example, one can produce documents with active cross-referencing, using the hyperref package [4, 4.7]. The not-soshort guide has been written this way, with clickable links to other parts of the document as well as to places on the web. One can also use colour, using the color package, and one can produce power-point like presentations in a number of ways (see, for example [4, 4.8] and slide example.tex). A useful quick reference is the NASA website Hypertext Help with L A TEX located at For more detailed information on L A TEX packages and manuals go to the CTAN Archive: 6. Notes on scientific writing There are many good books which offer advice and guidance about good use of English in documents where precision and conciseness are the main aims. Two aimed specifically at writing mathematics are [1] and [2]. A remarkably entertaining book on punctuation, which I think everybody should read, is [5]. Here are some very brief tips: 6.1. Grammar, punctuation and spelling. Make sure that your report is written in complete sentences, and that it does not contain elementary grammatical errors. In particular, every sentence should contain a verb, and this verb should agree with its subject. Punctuation: some aspects of punctuation are very subtle, others are not [5]. Please check in particular that you use its and it s correctly, as in the following: but It s a beautiful day today. She put the apostrophe in its proper place. Correct punctuation is very important in making sentences readable: use commas etc. to clarify the structure of longer sentences. Clarity of your writing is the most important objective. Keep sentence structure simple and short. Make sure you do not repeat yourself needlessly. Read out loud what you have written. If you can not easily and naturally say it, then it probably will not make sense to anyone else. Use a spell-checker.

6 6 UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH 6.2. How not to... Here are twenty examples of bad writing: Verbs has to agree with their subjects. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with. And don t start a sentence with a conjunction. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive. Avoid clichés like the plague. Also, always avoid annoying alliteration. Be more or less specific. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are (usually) unnecessary. No sentence fragments. Contractions aren t necessary and shouldn t be used. One should never generalize. Don t use no double negatives. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc. Eliminate commas, that are, not necessary. Never use a big word when a diminutive one would suffice. Kill all exclamation marks!!! Use words correctly, irregardless of how others use them. Use the apostrophe in it s proper place and omit it when its not needed. Puns are for children not groan readers. Proofread carefully to see if you any words out Conventions of scientific writing. Scientific reports (and other reports, where precision is important) are usually written in a sober, impersonal style. Avoid quirkiness, personal language, colloquialisms and jokiness it may amuse some readers but it is likely to annoy others and may lead to what you write not being taken seriously. It is tiresome to read reports written entirely in the first or second persons. You should not write or I m now going to tell you how to integrate this function. First I m going to divide top and bottom by x, then I m going t make the substitution y = x 2... To see why this is true, you just have to substitute in the definitions. Then when you ve simplified, you find that... It is conventional to use we or one, or to use the passive. Again, it is tiresome if we is used throughout an entire document, but it is difficult to read documents where one keeps chopping and changing. The following might be more acceptable renderings of the above spoof mathematics: In order to integrate this function, first divide top and bottom by x. Making the substitution y = x 2, we obtain... In order to see why this is true, it is enough to substitute in the definitions. On simplification, one finds that... Do not begin sentences with formulae or mathematical symbols and remember to enclose even single letters such as x in dollar signs, so as to get

7 LATEX SHORT COURSE 7 x rather than x. Remember punctuation at the end of displayed equations and formulae Organization of material. In any writing in which precise information is to be conveyed concisely to the reader, it is highly desirable to spend some time deciding how to organize the material: what is really essential, what is less important; and in what order should the different topics be presented. L A TEX makes it very easy to organize your report into sections, subsections, subsubsections and paragraphs, and you should make full use of this, deciding how best to divide your material. This document is by no means perfect, but I have tried to use the sectioning commands in a consistent way: each of the three assignments has a section to itself, preceded by the introductory sections Overview and Getting Started. In the context of writing mathematics, you should also make use of numbered definitions, theorems, propositions, etc. It takes some practice to get the right balance between a formal style in which everything is a definition, lemma, theorem, or proof, and an informal style, with no definitions and theorems: the former is very dry to read, but has the advantage that you can see clearly what is being done the latter may be more enjoyable to read, but you cannot see the main points at a glance. References [1] Nicholas J. Higham, Handbook of writing for the mathematical sciences, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, Philadelphia, [2] Steven G. Krantz, A primer of mathematical writing: being a disquisition on having your ideas recorded, typeset, published, read, and appreciated, American Mathematical Society, Providence, R.I. c1997. [3] T Oetiker, H Partl, I Hyna, E Schlegl, The Not So Short Introduction to Latex2e Version 3.20, 9 August [4] T Oetiker, H Partl, I Hyna, E Schlegl, The Not So Short Introduction to Latex2e, Version 4.17, September 27, [5] Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots and Leaves, Profile Books, 2003.