LaTeX pronounced «Lay-tech» is a document preparation system suitable for producing a range of documents such as articles and books. LaTeX is particularly good when you need to include mathematical equations in your document, something that competing systems such as word processors are not very good at. LaTeX is capable of producing documents of great beauty and consistency. LaTex is not a word processor but is very powerful, capable of handling documents that are too large to be easily handled by a word processor. LaTeX is capable of handling sophisticated page layouts, more like a desktop publisher than a word processor.
In the early days of phototypesetting circa 1978 Prof. Donald Knuth set about creating a typesetting language called TeX, capable of handling mathematical equations. TeX was not the easiest of languages for mere mortals to work with so circa 1985 Leslie Lamport created a language which worked on top of TeX, something like a set of macros for TeX, this was called LaTeX. LaTeX has had a very successful history, is currently at version 2e (2 epsilon), with version 3 being in development and likely to stay that way for some years. LaTeX is supported by a number of significant tools. The invention of the laser printer and Adobe PostScript had a big impact on use of LaTeX. LaTeX is now mostly used to compile directly to Adobe pdf documents.
The natural home for LaTeX is on a UNIX platform. Most UNIX platforms will already have LaTeX and supporting tools installed. If not already installed they can be easily found from the LaTeX project site . If you are unlucky enough to be working on a Windoze platform then you should install this MikTeX package which provides LaTeX and supporting software such as BibTeX and Yap.
This LaTeX user guide in PDF format written by the author is compiled from this LaTeX source file togther with this accompanying BibTex file (Complete set of source files as zip). This LaTeX user guide from the good people at Rice University will provide additional help. There are various options for including vector and bitmapped images into your LaTeX document. The preferred way of handling bitmapped images is to convert them to PostScript in which case this jpeg2ps package is exceedingly useful.
The power of LateX becomes obvious when creating a large or complex document. This is when you reap the manifest rewards of investing in the time and effort to learn to use a document preparation system which automates so many of the most difficult and time consuming problems. This thesis template allows each chapter to be compiled as a separate source file and included (commented out) as necessary to speed progress. This examples abstract section and introduction chapter illustrate how each separate LateX source file is formatted. (The baseline stuff simply alters the line spacing.)
You may not have all of the syle files used in this template, which is not a big problem, they can either be found of not used. The boldtt style was created to provide bold highlighting of code sections. This has not been tested on windoze - yet.
A good text editor, such as vi, is an essential tool for working with LaTeX. EditPlus on windoze provides some useful features if you install these LaTeX syntax file and LaTeX ctl files. You may also find it helpful to install a spell checker in your EditPlus. Word counting in EditPlus is in the Edit menu.
A dedicated LaTeX editor worth considering is Texmaker, which integrates many of the LaTeX tools into a single application. A more heavyweight editor is Lyx which provides a semi-WYSIWYG environment. Both are free of charge open source software available on unix, macosx and windows systems and released under the GPL license. There are other even heavier environments, some of which cost money, some of which suffer from locking the user into their own commercial libraries which limits the usefulness of your otherwise portable LaTeX source.
There are several decent books to help you. The key text is LATEX: User's Guide and Reference Manual by Leslie Lamport (the La in LaTeX).
Publishing your documet in HTML is easily achieved using the LaTeX2HTML convertor.