Typesetting in 90 Minutes 35 years of typesetting technology in less than 2 hours

The LaTeX installation for Windows is called MikTeX and can be downloaded from http://www.miktex.org/about.

The first few FAQ entries at http://docs.miktex.org/faq/faq.html may be helpful in getting MikTeX installed.

The LaTeX installation for Mac OS X is called MacTeX and can be downloaded from http://tug.org/mactex/.

That same web page (http://tug.org/mactex/) links to other helpful documents about maintaining the MacTeX installation.

LaTeX can be installed on Ubuntu through the software center or via the command line by typing sudo apt-get install texlive at a shell prompt.

The contents of a very simple LaTeX document are:

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
This is my document.  There isn't much to it.

This is the second paragraph of my document.  This
paragraph is longer than the first paragraph because
I kept typing words in this paragraph, and didn't
type as many words in the preceding paragraph.

This is my third paragraph, the shortest yet.

\end{document}

The first line, \documentclass{article}, is the most common type of document you'll write in LaTeX—the other common options are letter for letter that you would mail to someone and book, which adds the option of chapters to your document. For anything beyond article you will probably want to consider packages other than letter and =book=³.

The second and last lines, \begin{document} and \end{document} bound your document—you always have to have these two lines and nearly all of your content will be between those two lines.

Between the \begin and \end lines is the content for your document. In this example it is three paragraphs. A paragraph is created by leaving a blank line. You don't have to wrap the lines yourself, they will be processed by LaTeX when you process your document.

A LaTeX document is simply a text file—this is one of the beauties of LaTeX: you'll always be able to read the text file.

If you are familiar with a text editor for programming, such as emacs or vi, you can use that editor to write LaTeX documents. If you prefer a more integrated environment for typing your documents, MacTeX comes with TeXworks and TeXshop, MikTeX comes with TeXworks, and on Ubuntu there are TeXmaker, Kile, Gummi, and many others.

After opening your editor, you should be able to paste in the sample document above, or start writing your own short document between the \begin{document} and \end{document} lines.

Save the file as sample.tex.

When you are done writing, you can process the document to a PDF file and see what you've created⁴.

If you have a .tex file, you can process it from the command line in the Windows command shell, the Mac Terminal, or a Linux xterm by typing:

pdflatex sample.tex

and you should see several lines of output, the first few and last few should be something like:

This is pdfTeX, Version 3.1415926-2.4-1.40.13 (TeX Live 2012)
 restricted \write18 enabled.
entering extended mode
(./sample.tex
   [... many more lines ...]
LaTeX2e <2011/06/27>
Output written on sample.pdf (1 page, 16198 bytes).
Transcript written on sample.log.

The LaTeX editors will have a menu item or button that will do the processing for you.

If there is an error, it isn't always easy to decode, but some of the editors will try to set the cursor at the point of the error. Otherwise, carefully read the error and check your .tex file for missing brackets, a \begin without its matching \end, and other typos.

Once you are able to successfully process sample.tex into sample.pdf and open sample.pdf and see it, we can start adding to the document.

Adding a title and author or authors to your document is straightforward⁵.

Between the \documentclass and \begin{document} lines, you should add:

\title{My Sample Document}
\author{Type Your Name Here}

and immediately after the \begin{document} line add the line:

\maketitle

After processing the updated .tex file, you will see a title, author, and today's date added to the top of your PDF file.

LaTeX supports numbering sections, subsections, and sub-subsections by simply adding a line that reads \section{My Section Title} (or \subsection{My subsection Title} or \subsubsection{My subsubsection Title}) before the section⁶.

Editing sample.tex and adding \section before the first and third paragraphs and \subsection before the second paragraph brings us to a source document that looks like:

\documentclass{article}
\title{My Sample Document}
\author{Type Your Name Here}
\begin{document}
\maketitle

\section{My first section}
This is my document.  There isn't much to it.

\subsection{A subsection for fun}
This is the second paragraph of my document.  This
paragraph is longer than the first paragraph because
I kept typing words in this paragraph, and didn't
type as many words in the preceding paragraph.

\section{My very short third section}
This is my third paragraph, the shortest yet.

\end{document}

Processing that file, assuming I didn't make any errors and you didn't introduce any in its transcription, should result in a document with a title, author, date, and two sections, one with a subsection.

While it is possible to create images in LaTeX directly using it's native but limited picture environment or the somewhat complicated TikZ package⁹, it is most common to create images in another package — gnuplot or R for plots, Adobe Illustrator or another drawing package for diagrams.

For this example, we'll make a plot using the statistical package R and write the plot to a file called mpg-weight.png. The R code for this is:

library(ggplot2)
mtcars$gear <- factor(mtcars$gear,levels=c(3,4,5), labels=c("3gears","4gears","5gears"))
mtcars$am   <- factor(mtcars$am,levels=c(0,1), labels=c("Automatic","Manual"))
mtcars$cyl  <- factor(mtcars$cyl,levels=c(4,6,8), labels=c("4cyl","6cyl","8cyl"))

qplot(wt, mpg, data=mtcars, geom=c("point", "smooth"),
     method="lm", formula=y~x, color=cyl,
     main="Regression of MPG on Weight",
     xlab="Weight", ylab="Miles per Gallon")

This file is included in the LaTeX output by adding the line:

\usepackage{graphicx}

immediately after the \documentclass{article} line in your .tex file and then including the lines¹⁰:

\begin{figure}
\includegraphics[width=.9\linewidth]{mpg-weight.png}
\caption{Weight vs. MPG}
\end{figure}

The full path to mpg-weight.png should be specified in the \includegraphics line; in this example LaTeX will assume that the image file is in the same directory as the .tex file.

You can download this image for using when processing sample.tex by right-clicking on it and saving it to the same folder as sample.tex.

The graphicx package combined with pdflatex can read PDF, PNG, JPEG, and MetaPost graphic formats. Other formats should be converted to one of these for inclusion. If you can export directly to PDF, that is ideal.

Adding tables of contents, tables, and figures to the front matter of your document is straight-forward.

To add a table of contents, add the line \tableofcontents after your \maketitle line to generate a table of contents. Because LaTeX is a single-pass processor, it stores some of its information in auxiliary files; this means that you may have to run pdflatex more than once to get all of the references resolved¹¹.

To add a list of figures, insert the line \listoffigures after the \maketitle or \tableofcontents lines in your .tex file.

To include a listing of tables at the front of your document, there is the \listoftables command that is analogous to the \listoffigures command.

Our current sample.tex file now looks like:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\title{My Sample Document}
\author{Type Your Name Here}
\begin{document}
\maketitle
\tableofcontents
\listoftables
\listoffigures
\section{My first section}
This is my document.  There isn't much to it.

\subsection{A subsection for fun}
This is the second paragraph of my document.  This
paragraph is longer than the first paragraph because
I kept typing words in this paragraph, and didn't
type as many words in the preceding paragraph.

\section{My very short third section}
This is my third paragraph, the shortest yet.

However, this section has a table and a figure.

 \begin{table}
 \begin{tabular}{l|r|r|r}
 Degrees Granted for Academic Year 2011-12 & Bachelors & Masters & Doctoral \\ \hline
 Degrees Granted                           &    1,348  &  1,093  &    258   \\
 \% Women                                  &      21\% &    21\% &    21\%  \\
 \% URM                                    &       7\% &     8\% &    14\%  \\ \hline
 \end{tabular}
 \caption{Engineering Degrees Granted for Academic Year 2011-12}
 \end{table}

\begin{figure}
\includegraphics[width=.9\linewidth]{mpg-weight.png}
\caption{Weight vs. MPG}
\end{figure}

\end{document}

This file demonstrates sections, tables, figures, and front-matter.

Lists

Lists in LaTeX are environments similar to other environments we've seen, like \begin{figure} … \end{figure}; the list environment for a bulleted list is itemize and for a numbered list is enumerate.¹²

Lists can be embedded for sub-items. Example LaTeX that shows this is:

\begin{enumerate}
  \item The first item in my list is this sentence; it's a
        pretty long sentences that has several properties:
  \begin{itemize}
    \item it has 18 words
    \item it has a semi-colon
    \item it has one apostrophed word
  \end{itemize}
  \item This is the second item in my list
  \item This is the end of my incredibly boring list
\end{enumerate}

1. The first item in my list is this sentence; it's a pretty long sentences that has several properties:
   • it has 18 words
   • it has a semi-colon
   • it has one apostrophed word
2. This is the second item in my list
3. This is the end of my incredibly boring list

Bibliographies

LaTeX can support simple bibliographies within a document using the \cite command in the document for citations and the \bibitem command in the thebibliography environment¹³.

For larger projects or areas of study, using BibTeX to maintain a bibliographic database and integrate with the \cite commands in several documents.

Debugging LaTeX documents

Writing LaTeX documents is similar to writing a computer program, with all of the debugging issues that go with computer programming.

The error messages produced by LaTeX can be difficult to decode; my preferred method of debugging is to localize the error without worrying too much about the error message by processing the document often, and especially after making significant additions.

If processing the document does result in errors that I cannot understand from the error, I then start by using the % to comment out parts of the LaTeX file and processing it until the error is gone, and looking at the commented section for errors.

The best web site for LateX support is Google, followed by StackOverflow. LaTeX-specific web sites are the website for the LaTeX Project, the TeX Users Group, and the LaTeX WikiBooks site. For additional packages for LaTeX, the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network is the definitive source; the umthesis class is available here, for example¹⁴.

There are 82 books in the search results for latex typesetting at Amazon. The canonical books, in my opinion, are:

• LaTeX: A Document Preparation System (2nd Edition) by Leslie Lamport
• The LaTeX Graphics Companion by Gossens, Mittelbach, Rahtz, and Voss
• The LaTeX Companion (2nd edition) by Mittelbach, Gossens, Braams, Carlisle, and Rowley

there are also a lot of other excellent books, many of which are available in the U-M libraries.

Emailing caen@umich.edu will come to me and others at CAEN and we'll do our best to help you.