LaTeX packages manual pages
Do you use LaTeX? I do. In fact, I really like the program. Unfortunately, it is based on an old system (which still perform amazingly well, though), so that many things work only if you know exactly what you are doing. That is probably the main reason why it has been adopted only in the academic circle, where people really need it and accept spending time understanding it. Hopefully, LaTeX3 (see here) will change that (and some more minor issues).
Anyway, I have some sort of "standard" empty LaTeX
file, a kind of template. It if (fully) commented, so it should be
understandable to anybody who already used LaTeX
some times.
You can get my actual template here (~8kb):
nicola-latex-std.tex
I am not going to explain anything about LaTeX to you; There are lots of good places on the net to do that (I'm not going to reccomend any to you, since I used to read "The TeX-Book" by Donald E. Knuth and later "LaTeX: A Document Preparation System" by Leslie Lamport), but I can help you some other way. I am tired sifting through CTAN (even if it is a great resource!) each time I cannot remember what a package did or how to use it. So here are some resources for the packages I use.
In my preamble I have something like this. Now you can click
on the package names to directly get some "official" documentation
about it (for those packages I could actually find something;
"*" marks the CTAN source,
"^" more in depth references).
Be warned: where possible, I have linked PDFs.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
\usepackage
{
% mostly not used
%================
inputenc *, % specify input encoding
fontenc *, % specify font encoding
% optional
%==================
ae *, % maps T1-coded EC-fonts on PS-version of CM-Fonts
amsmath * ^, % enhancements to mathematical formulas
beamer * ^, % make nifty slide shows
bm *, % provides bold math fonts
bbm *, % provides number set letters
dcolumn *, % align table entries at decimal point
makeidx *, % creates index when input reads \printindex
oldstyle *, % provide old style numbers
setspace *, % provides double- and oneandhalfspacing options
% essentials
%====================
amssymb * ^, % math fonts and symbols
array *, % advaced tables
babel * ^, % hyphenation patterns
calc *, % provides calculation support (for LaTeX internals)
color * ^, % provides colors
enumerate *, % enhances the enumerate environment
eurosym *, % provides Euro currency symbol
geometry *, % provides easy means for page layout (margins and stuff)
graphicx * ^ ^, % graphics manipulation (extended/enhanced "graphics")
longtable, % allow multipage tables
lscape, % provide landscape (lscape) environment (eg for use with longtable)
multirow *, % span multiple rows capabilityi
palatino *, % use Palatino/Helvetica/Courier for rm/sf/tt (instead of cm/cm/cm)
palatcm, % use Palatino/CM/CM (better for mathematical texts)
hyperref * % creates hyperlinks in the document (warning:
% check print driver and try to load as last)
}
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Some more stuff that can come in very handy:
symbols-a4.pdf:
A thorough list of symbols you can produce with LaTeX. Always indicates
which package to load in order to get the symbol!
short-math-guide.pdf:
A short introduction (and also a mind-refresher) on how to typeset
math in LaTeX. By the American Mathematical Society, so they do
know where it's at!
all copyright © their respective owners
Last modified: 01:41 13/Jun/05 |•| What does all this mean?