[LUGSB] How many of you know LaTeX?

[Justin Seyster]

I use LaTeX a lot for writing papers (I'm a grad student).  Truth be told, there aren't many other things I could use it for!  (Grad students are not often permitted out of the lab for other activities.)  On the rare occasion I need to send a printed letter, I usually type it up in LaTex.  There is a nice template for letters out of the box, actually.  I once typeset a short story with LaTeX.  It came out pretty slick.

The best way to learn LaTeX is pretty much like any programming language.  Just get the basics (what you see in my homework example, more or less), and then Google around whenever you want to do something and you can't figure it out with what you've got.

As for interactivity, I guess that's just not the way Knuth and the other hacker geeks who develop the system ever envisoined it.  There is a simplicity to it: you just edit in your favorite text editor and then run make (I have Makefiles for all my papers) to see how it came out.  It's also pretty decent for collaboration if you all your sources in version control.  You might be interested in trying LyX, which is a graphical editor for LaTeX.  It looks pretty good, but I've never tried it myself.

If you have both PDF and EPS version of a figure, then LaTeX will choose the appropriate one.  If you run the latex command, then it uses the EPS version; if you run pdflatex, then it uses the PDF version.  That's why it's useful to omit the extension: it makes your sources compilable with both latex and pdflatex.

Oh, I forgot one word of warning!  Be careful about using transparency or gradients in your Inkscape graphics.  If you do, Inkscape will rasterize them when you convert to EPS, which looks ugly.  I got bitten by this a few times.
        --Justin

From: lugsb-bounces at fsl.cs.sunysb.edu [mailto:lugsb-bounces at fsl.cs.sunysb.edu] On Behalf Of Ehtesh Choudhury
Sent: Friday, April 08, 2011 2:09 AM
To: Linux Users Group at Stony Brook
Subject: Re: [LUGSB] How many of you know LaTeX?

Do you use it for other things now that you know it? It really ought to be taught, along with REPL testing and editor/IDE usage, in some lower level classes. Would be more valuable to a CS student than UML, I think.

Haha, what happens in the case you have both a .eps and a .pdf  with the same 'filename'?

Also, when did you start picking it up? Why isn't it more... interactive -- less compiling, more generating on the fly? Although I guess some variants of LaTeX must do that by now?
On Thu, Apr 7, 2011 at 4:23 PM, Justin Seyster <justin at seyster.org> wrote:
The learning curve can be steep.  It is fun though, and your results
will look a lot nicer than anybody else's in the class.  Basically,
LaTeX is easy to use until you hit one of the things it just doesn't
want to do.  Then you have to either accept that you won't get exactly
the output you want or tear you hear out for hours trying to figure out
what magic incantation will soothe the great LaTeX deities.

Here's a homework I submitted a while ago as a template.  It defines
this cool "question" command!  I'm not sure where it came from (most
likely it came from Professor Stark, who taught this particular class).

I recommend Inkscape for including figures and diagrams.  (It's Free
Software and available for all major platforms.)  First save your figure
in Inkscape's native SVG format and then save a copy as EPS (if you are
using the latex command) or PDF (if you are using the pdflatex command).
Then you can insert the figure with:

\begin{figure}
 \center
 \includegraphics[width=0.9\textwidth]{filename}
 \caption{An impressive figure demonstrating my extensive knowledge.}
\end{figure}

Don't include the .eps or .pdf extension in the filename, LaTeX will
infer the correct extension.  Also, you can change the 0.9 value to
whatever size you want (as a fraction of the width of the text column).

Finally, make sure to use lots of pompous wording, as in my example, so
as to intimidate graders.
       --Justin

On Thu, 2011-04-07 at 15:27 -0400, Ehtesh Choudhury wrote:
> Just wondering about the learning curve. I can do simple expressions
> and stuff, but... I'm wondering if I should be using it for future
> homeworks. It's more appropriate than handwriting, I think. But I was
> wondering how certain things would be displayed... like diagrams? Do
> you just include them as a reference to a file?
>
> Or maybe there's some nice simple homework outputting method that
> involves minimal LaTeX, meaning, no worrying about uh... templates and
> where things go (for the most part).
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