Notes for use of LaTeX and associated packages


LaTeX is an extremely useful typesetting language often used for scientific publications.

Like many open source projects, the packages for LaTeX suffer from duplication and frequent bugs.

Following are my notes about how to work around things.


Compiling to pdf

There are multiple options for this.

  1. pdflatex – Figures must be in image formats and not eps, can convert using epstopdf

  2. dvips, ps2pdf -

  3. dvipdf – script implementing dvips, ps2pdf

  4. dvipdfm – not working for powerdot, drops colors, hyperref does not work

  5. dvipdfmx


Important packages:

  1. geometry – for setting margins easily

  2. graphicx – for including graphics in file

  3. epstopdf – this automatically converts eps files to pdf files when using pdflatex. When running pdflatex from the command line, you need to use the –shell-escape option to allow external creation of pdf files

  4. amsmath – if you are typesetting math, you should use this

  5. hyperref -


Presentations:

I have personally used prosper and powerdot. Powerdot is a successor to prosper.

With prosper, always had trouble with the slide footers being rendered correctly for pdf.

It was functional, but I don't think there is any reason you would want to use proser over powerdot anymore.

There is also beamer. Powerdot is simpler.


Powerdot does not support pdflatex. It must be compiled using latex.


Math typesetting:

Although LaTeX is advertised as being great for typesetting mathematics (and it is relative to my experiences with equation editor in Microsoft Word years ago), it is still limited. The capabilities have been extended with the amsmath package.


Bibliographies

You can create a database for your bibliography, and reference those papers you need.

Good reference:

http://amath.colorado.edu/documentation/LaTeX/reference/faq/bibstyles.html


Google scholar helps to speed this up. Under preferences, enable bibTeX citations. Now when you search for papers, you can get a clean bibliography citation. Unfortunately, you may still need to clean up bibliography fields.


http://had.fmf.uni-lj.si/~horvat/publishing/latex/general/latex2pdf.pdf


ps2pdf: Had problems with the bug

http://objectmix.com/graphics/139985-gnuplot-eps-figures-overwrite-latex-hyperref-settings.html