Getting stared with LaTeX
February 21, 2010 13 Comments
I’m writing a blog post after a long time. Since there were our exams I didn’t get any free time to think out of the box but now as I’m free I thought of writing something I found out recently. That is LaTeX.
What is Latex?
As Wikipedia says Latex is a document markup language and a document preparation system for the Tex typesetting program.
All of you might have thought the Hello World! program is only for programming languages. Nope its not only for programming languages you can have a Hello World for Latex too. Its not that difficult but till you understand how to use the tags and all you might have to spend some time playing with latex. Basically learning Latex is almost as same as learning HTML for the first time. You have to know your tags and the attributes and thats it. It’s as simple as that.
Now the most important part:
From where can we learn this??
Thats the first thing came into my mind when I heard about Latex. There is nothing to be afraid of there are several well explained tutorials.
Those are:
LaTeX wikibooks
Getting to grips with LaTex
Steps for getting started with LaTeX
Beginner’s LaTeX tutorial
and there are many more; these are few of those links I used to learn LaTeX
Then there is another question:
What are the tools or editors we can use??
There are few editors which I use.
Those are Winefish, kile and lyx and you have to remember these are for ubuntu. Most of the LaTeX editors are not WYSIWYG editors but lyx is a WYSIWYG editor and when you come to windows platform LEd is a good tool for you to use. It is kind of a WYSIWYG editor where you can have a small preview but so far the best LaTex editor for me is Winefish. Winefish is really easy to use almost as same as gedit (there is a gedit plugin for latex too) and there is auto generation of tags in Winefish so its easy but thats my choice so I recommend Winefish but you can use any of those editors you prefer. When it comes to kile it is KDE based so it might not work properly in GNOME.
Here are some screen-shots
Winefish
Kile
Lyx
gedit
LEd
Ok we have reached the end of this post have fun 
P.S.
In addition I have to talk about Texmaker. This is my new favorite its really good you’ll love it when you get to know.
Texmaker
~~ Rusiru Boteju ~~
About Rusiru Boteju
About 90% or more of my documentation has been LaTeX of text files for the last 12 years. So, naturally, I am pleasantry surprised to this article.
Wow thats nice
I’m just touching through the surface of LaTeX
Perfect!Great! This helped a lot! I’ve seen a few
rather confusing websites lately, this cleared up a lot confusion I had.
you are welcome
After reading you site, Your site is very useful for me .I bookmarked your site!
you are welcome
[ ... ] link is being shared on Twitter right now. @zenx, an influential author, said RT @1ndus: Xtreme [ ... ]
Pingback: LaTeX for busy people, Part 1: Introduction « Pause Hi-Tech
Thank you very much machan.. i’m using LEd for windows and it’s working well.
I’m using Kile with gnome. I managed it by installing both gdm and kdm in Ubuntu Lucid. I can switch between them at log in, although I tend to use gnome more. Once I installed Kile in kdm, it worked fine in gnome. I have heard that Kile can be installed in Gnome, but loads some extra files that it needs to run without kdm. Great post. I’ve been using LyX and Kile, but I think I’ll have a look at winefish.
hi wats your myspace page
i’m not in myspace i’m in facebook
Pingback: Academic reference management with Mendeley « Life and Tech