Wenguang Wang's LaTeX Introduction

This page is an introduction of LaTeX for beginners. This page was built based on my experience learning LaTeX as a beginner. Most documents were not written by me, but I try to give you good suggestions so that you can start using LaTeX to write your documents in the shortest time.

By reaching this page, I assume that you find LaTeX is suitable for some of your document writing work. But if you are not sure whether you should use LaTeX, see Why LaTeX.

This page contains LaTeX documents for beginners, sample LaTeX files, drawing graphics in LaTeX, setting up LaTeX and xfig on Windows, etc.

  1. How to read LaTeX?
    It is lei-tek. Some people read it as la-tek. But NEVER read it as lei-teks, which is a rubber product.
  2. LaTeX introductions.
    I first learned LaTeX from these manuals. They are very well written and easy to understand.
  3. Generating pdf from LaTeX
    LaTeX file can be used to generate postscript or pdf format. The pdf file has many advantages than postscript. It can contain bookmarks of the table of contents, hyperlinks to the figures, tables, bibliography references, or web site links. This page introduces how to generate pdf file from your LaTeX source file.
  4. LaTeX Sample File
    This is my LaTeX sample file. It includes many common used features of a LaTeX document, including but not limited to figures, tables, subfigures.
  5. Graphics
    LaTeX does not support drawing figures in WYSIWYG way. You need other software to draw figures, convert to eps, and import the eps file into your LaTeX file as explained in this file. Depends on the feature of your figure, different graphics packages may fit you.
  6. Bibliography Database Server
  7. Plot bar chart (filled boxes)
    If you have MS Excel or similar programs from other Office suites, you can draw bar charts and then convert to eps: Gnuplot is a good tool to plot various figures. However, it does not support filled bar charts. The solution in this link does not work very well. MetaPost with the ascii_chart macro package can be used to draw bar charts, which is not WYSIWYG.
  8. Creating Presentations in PDFLaTeX
    LaTeX (or TeX) can be used to generate beautiful presentation slides in pdf format. There are several packages that can do this. PPower4 is one of it. The advantage is that you can generate beautiful math equations easily. The disadvantages are: (1) it is hard to add more fonts to LaTeX (2) it is harder than PowerPoint to arrange the location and size of texts.
  9. Get LaTeX Software
  10. Get help for LaTeX

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