Typesetting of mathematical text using LaTeX

I have often been asked about the LaTeX typesetting software. I will make a few comments here, and provide some links.


LaTeX is Open Source as well as free software. This has the consequence that it benefits from work done all over the world by extremely well intentioned people who have an interest in its development. There are numerous mailing lists, for example:

• TUGIndia - see TUGIndiaMailingList
• Two Google groups, comp.text.tex and LaTeX users group

These lists are very helpful, with subscribers all over the world willing to give of their time to help you out when you are in doubt.


In working with LaTeX you actually work on a text editor. I use TeXnic Center, but there are many other editors available. See FreeTexEditors. The best and easiest to use, in my view, are: 

• TeXnic Center (see Wikipedia-TeXnicCenter and TexnicCenter) 
• Texmaker (see Wikipedia-Texmaker and Texmaker)
• Texworks (see Texworks)

They are all freely downloadable.


Note that LaTeX is not WYSIWYG software. When you work on the text editor, all you will see along with the main text are a lot of markup tags - dollar symbols, backslashes, etc. It is only when the LaTex file is processed ("LaTeXed" as a LaTeX user would say) that you will see the typeset output.


Because of this, and because so many of us have been brought up on WYSIWYG software of various kinds, the initial learning curve for LaTeX is a bit steep. But it is important that we do not give up our experiments with LaTeX at this stage, because the effort will be more than worth it. There is nothing like LaTeX! You will appreciate this when you see the quality of the typeset text.


Assuming you are using Windows I recommend going in for MikTeX. Please go to MikTeX and download the entire package (the current version is MikTeX 2.8). The full instructions will be found on that webpage, for the download, installation. Then download one of the editors listed above, and configure it to MikTeX. Note that MikTeX has an inbuilt updating mechanism.


Here are some LaTeX tutorials freely available on the net (there are many more of this kind, please look on the net):

• Duke tutorial
  
• TUGIndia LaTeX tutorials
  
• LaTeX-wiki
  
• LaTeX tutorial
  

See also:

• LaTeX project
  
• ProTeXt
  

The last link (ProTeXt) is particularly convenient: it allows you to download a single archive that installs all the packages you need - MikTeX, Texnic Center, Ghostscript, Ghostview, etc. I myself did my entire LaTeX related installation using ProTeXt.


Next time I will say something about graphics editors that work with LaTeX.