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!


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