Using LaTeX

This page collects together suggestions and views on different LaTeX environments, as provided by members of my research group; suggesters' names are in parentheses. Additions are always welcome; the aim of the page is to provide a resource that those who are new to LaTeX can use to get started.

For a good introduction to LaTeX, see the WikiBooks Entry on LaTeX (recommended by Ilya Anisimoff). An excellent primer is The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX2e by Tobias Oetiker and his colleagues. See also my LaTeX Style Tips and notes on Declarative Formatting.

LaTeX under Windows

• 'I use WinEdt and MikTex on Windows machines.' [Vanessa Long]

• 'I use MiKTeX and TeXnicCenter on my Windows install. My main grip was the spell checker, which I overcame, when writing my doctoral thesis, by copy&pasting the whole lot into Word to check the spelling.' [Rainer Wasinger]

• 'I'm using TeXnicCenter for Latex. It's free and runs on Windows.' [Tuomo Kakkonen]

• 'On Windows I used to use WinEdt. It costs US$30, but I really liked it. It does all the LateXing by button click.' [Jette Viethen]

LaTeX under Unix and on the Mac

• The equivalent of MikTeX for Mac is mac-tex. [Daniel Sutyanto]

• 'I use TeX Live with gedit and the gedit LaTeX plugin on Linux.' [Vanessa Long]

• 'On the Mac I'm using TexShop which is free and also really nice and also does all the LaTeXing automatically.' [Jette Viethen]

• 'I'm using Kile as a front end for Linux and Unix-based systems. It's very similar to TeXnicCenter (for Windows only), although not as advanced. It's got a bunch of convenient features for project management, cross-references, editing -- of course, and comes with a reasonable library of latex commands and special characters. Missing features/inconveniences: no CVS/Subversion interface; some features only work with the KDE win manager, like the spellchecker and the LaTeX help (though it's true that I didn't try very hard to make them work with Gnome); no embedded mechanism for installing/managing extra LaTeX packages (unlike with TeXnicCenter, which does it very nicely). I like it much better than TeXmaker, another one for Linux. I don't like TeXmaker's editor and project manager, which aren't that advanced.' [Jean-Philippe Prost]

LaTeX for Bibliographies

• 'For keeping my bibtex files in order I'm using JabRef, which runs on any os. It took me a while to find a bib file editor/organiser I liked. ... Texshop also comes with a bib file editor that I didn't like as much as JabRef.' [Jette Viethen]

• 'On the Mac I am using BibDesk for maintaing bibliography (I prefer this one to JabRef).' [Pawel Mazur]

• 'I was fussing over the technical details of the template for my thesis and in particular the bilbiography and citation styles, when I came across this neat interactive program that lets you create your own bst files without having to write the whole cryptic style files yourself.' [Jette Viethen]

See also my BibTeX and XML page.

LaTeX for Graphs, Diagrams, and Other Stuff

• 'For graphs and diagrams I use metapost.' [Vanessa Long]

• 'On the Mac I am using TexTable for generating LaTeX tables. I also used LaTeX Equation Editor to generate PDFs with complex formulae, but now it seems to generate bad results (maybe an OS upgrade made the software unstable ...).' [Pawel Mazur]

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Last Modified: 14th July 2009