LaTeX

Index

  1. LaTeX!
  2. A case for LaTeX
  3. LaTeX basics
  4. LaTeX: format basics
  5. LaTeX: LyX Revisited
  6. LaTeX: Makefile
  7. LaTeX: including documents
  8. LaTeX: Including Source Code

LaTeX!

Published 2009-05-12

Some time ago I wrote a review about LyX for DPOTD (recommended link) and now I think it's time for an update: what can you do when LyX is not enough?

I'll quote myself; the original article ends (almost) like this:

What LyX isn’t for

Although LyX may be a valuable piece in anyone toolkit it’s worth noticing it isn’t exactly the Swiss army knife of the text editors. If you need to define a very customized layout or format, like slides for a presentation, this is the wrong tool for the job.

After having prepared several presentations with LyX (even my CV!) I'd like to write some more on this last part. Even if I thought that my original comment was mistaken I write once again the same: when you have to create a presentation LyX is not the tool for the job, LaTeX is.

As I explained in that article, LyX is a front-end for LaTeX but at the same time it's only a small part of LaTeX. Doing several presentations in LyX (using Beamer, a package I'll talk about in another post) I noticed that most of my documents where "ERT", evil red text, which is nothing else than plain TeX code: that means, each time more, I was using LaTeX functionality not available from LyX. This is the reason I've decided to write a how-to LaTeX, a small survival guide for those want to start using with the tips and tricks I've learned in this time.

The target for these posts series will be, mainly, programmers or other advanced users, without fear of working a little bit in the console, markup languages and maybe a makefile.

Soon the first part :)

A case for LaTeX

Published 2009-05-21

So, after struggling with you word processor to get an acceptable format you decide to hunt the repos (you're using Linux, right?) for a better alternative. We already know why would you choose LyX but why would you choose LaTeX?

Let's begin by listing some of its advantages

It has some downsides too

Who should use LaTeX?

As previously stated, programmers will be more comfortable around plain LaTeX but that's not the only pre requisite - you should be somewhat familiar with the console in Linux (no idea about LaTeX on Windows) and have some patience to read a couple of manuals. Once you have mastered the basics it's much easier, so don't get discouraged.

If you feel you don't fit the profile perhaps LyX is a better alternative than plain LaTeX; it's very easy to use and quite user friendly. It won't be that great for presentations and other, more "advanced", documents though.

What kind of work can you do with LaTeX?

That's an easy one, check My Articles section for some examples. You can create any kind of document but it's better suited for those in which you care most about the content and don't want to get bogged down with pesky design details.

Editors

Last (for this entry) but not least, what editor can you use to create LaTeX documents? Well, LaTeX is basically plain text so any editor will do. There are some LaTeX-specific editors, I like ViM myself. There'll be a complete post dedicated to LaTeX + Vim, coming soon.

This article will be the first in a series of LaTeX survival guide so stay tuned.

LaTeX basics

Published 2009-05-28

LaTeX basics

Remember last post? I mentioned it's possible to create several type of documents. Even if the structure will, most likely, be different for different applications, there's a common ground which can be used for most LaTeX documents. I'd go as far as saying ALL of them, but in LaTeX it's possible to override everything and anything. Any reasonable package won't do it, so let's see some LaTeX basics you can use for any project.

LaTeX documents

The first thing to understand about LaTeX, it's not WYSIWYG. If you use a plain text editor you won't see any kind of format at all (LyX provides some sort of preview though). This confuses some people who, used to Word-like applications, tend to think in the structure and desing before the contents; LaTeX is different in the way to structure documents, a way which is called What You See Is What You Mean, WYSIWYM, for short.

What does being WYSIWYM means? You just think about the content and structure and it gets formatted for you. Instead of saying you want "Centered, Arial 12px orange font with pink background" just say "this is a title". The format will be there, but not attached to the content - it'll be in a "stylesheet", the document's class (*). Of course, these styles can be changed too.

WYSIWYM has a downside too: you'll have to "compile" the mark-up text into a pdf (or any other format) using pdflatex, for example. It may be a shock to some but it's not difficult, just write "pdf2latex file.tex" and let it work its magic. You can use the makefile I'm attaching to this post too, if you feel comfortable with makefiles (The makefile has a few cool tricks you can use too. I'll explain all of it in another entry).

Seeing some examples

In GNU/Linux you can find lots of examples and templates in /usr/share/doc/texlive-doc/latex/ (no idea where may they be in Windows). Writing this article I found out lots of templates I didn't know about so go and take a look. Go on, I'll wait here. Done? Ok, let's move on.

Preamble

In LaTeX there's a basic structure every document follows:

% Preamble
begin{document}
end{document}

What comes before the begin'ning is the preamble. There you can tell LaTeX: * Which packages are you going to use - there are lots of packages, some examples include source code highlighting, including images, absolute positioning of figures and much more. Include them with the usepackage command

This post is getting a little bit too large so I'll leave some basic commands for the next one; you should be able to start writing some basic documents anyway.

(*) Yeah, something like content and style separation but only a couple of decades before it was "invented" for the WWW.

LaTeX: format basics

Published 2009-06-22

Basic structure

So, what's the most basic structural elements for any document you write? Paragraphs, of course. I ussualy use LyX for writing paragraph-based documents (i.e. most of them) and presentations don't have many, so perhaps this is the structural element I use the least. Oh, wait, there's no element, just a "nn". Point for LaTeX (take that, HTML).

You'll also need to put titles, sections, subtitles and all that stuff to give your document a nice structure. Well, that's easy too, just use

Easy, right? Check the example at the end of the post.

There are some other commands you'll use in any LaTeX document:

footnote{ Footnote text }

Just write your text, it'll be there when you compile the document

bigskip

Because, some times, LaTeX default formatting won't be enough.

begin{center}TEXTend{center}

Right:

begin{flushright}TEXTend{flushright}

Again, some times you may need it. Not too often, though.

You should now be able to write your first LaTeX document, starting from a template (always start with a template... it's easier). I'm attaching to this post an example document in LyX, LaTeX and its compiled pdf, in case you're wondering what does it look like in the end. For the next entry: some "advanced" tips and tricks, now let's see an example LaTeX document:

documentstyle[11pt]{article}
title{LaTeX Example}
author{Nicol'as Brailovsky}
setlength{topmargin}{-.5in}
setlength{oddsidemargin}{.125in}
setlength{textwidth}{6.25in}
begin{document}
maketitle
This is just a LaTeX kick off, with some basic commands.
section {Section one}
For example, this is a paragraph.
begin{quotation}
{ em Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.}
Donec porta, enim eget tempus tempor, eros sem dapibus diam, vitae lacinia mauris metus id nulla.
end{quotation}
subsection{Subsection}
You can have subsections too ldots
subsection{Subsection'}
ldots as many as you want
subsection{Random stuff}
You can even create a shopping list in LaTeX, if you wish
begin{center}
begin{itemize}
item Beer
item Beer
  begin{itemize}
    item (Another brand of beer)
  end{itemize}
item Pizza
item Beer
end{itemize}
end{center}
Or even better, use it to do the homework. \
Math is a breeze in LaTeX: $x_n = sqrt{a + b}$ can be typeset inline.
end{document}

You can download the compiled document from this link. May be it doesn't look too useful (I'd use LyX instead) but soon we'll start doing some cool stuff LyX can't handle. Keep tuned for the next LaTeX article.

LaTeX: LyX Revisited

Published 2009-06-29

Seeing I'm publishing a new LaTeX series it seems appropiate to review my old LyX article. This is just a copy & paste from http://debaday.debian.net/2008/01/20/lyx-a-text-editor-that-stays-out-of-the-way/ Did you ever get to struggle against your text editor’s random format feature while trying to write a document? Open Office may be a great project, but when you want to focus on the content, it can be annoying to have your editor format or unformat your text, seemingly at random.

Well there are good news for those of us using Vim to create content and then Abiword to format it: LyX is a text editor that produces beautiful documents, without the need of being a designer, and yet manages to stay out of the way. From the tutorial and the homepage (www.lyx.org):

LyX is the first WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Mean) document processor. The basic idea of LyX is that you do not need to handle style, or actually, you use a set of predefined styles and concentrate on your document content, This makes sure that your resulting document will be typographically correct and good looking visually. […] LyX uses Latex as its back end typesetting mechanism.

Sounds great already, doesn’t it?

A first look into LyX

Upon start LyX looks more or less like any other graphical text editor in the universe:

[MISSING IMAGE]

Well, it’s logo may look nicer, but that’s about it. Anyway, the magic starts just as you start writing: you’ll notice most of the common format options seems missing, but you can define what you’re writing instead:

[MISSING IMAGE]

Note that we don’t tell it to center it or to make the font larger and bold. LyX takes care of all that automatically. Simply click on the format menu (below File, and it has the default value of “Standard”).

So instead of defining Times New Roman 12px bold centered, you say «Title». WYSIWYM, remember? In the homepage there is a «Graphical Tour» with all the basic functions, it’s quick and it’s great: www.lyx.org/LGT

Some useful features

LyX also provides a great support for math formulas (and all the weird symbols you can think off). Just click the button «Insert Equation» and a box to enter math symbols will appear. No more struggle to align the dividend and the divisor!

Of course, LyX provides the usual features such as tables, spell checking, footnotes and many more. The tutorial of the application is more than complete, and easy to follow.

LyX documents formats

LyX documents can be exported to a wide variety of formats, mainly because being based on Latex it takes advantage of the already existing conversion programs. Some of the possible export plugins installed by default are PS, PDF, DVI, Latex, HTML and Plain text, but custom ones may be defined. What LyX isn’t for

Although LyX may be a valuable piece in anyone toolkit it’s worth noticing it isn’t exactly the Swiss army knife of the text editors. If you need to define a very customized layout or format, like slides for a presentation, this is the wrong tool for the job.

Availability

According to it’s homepage, LyX 1.5.3 was released the 16 th of December, 2007. It’s available in Debian since Sarge (packages.debian.org/LyX). Lyx Version 1.5.1, released 4 th of August, 2007, is available in the repository of Ubuntu 7.10. Development is still active. There’s also a Windows version for those of us stuck with primitive a OS at work.

LaTeX: Makefile

Published 2009-07-02

Remember I said that being a programmer would make you a lot more comfortable around LaTeX? The reason is quite simple, tex is just source code for a document. As with any source code in Linux (Windows too, but that is besides the point) you can use a Makefile to compile it and make your life easier.

I have already posted this Makefile in another entry but it's time to explain how it works.


all: main.pdf
main.pdf: code_frames .tex
  pdflatex main.tex && pdflatex main.tex
.PHONY: run clean edit
edit:
  gvim -S vim.sess
run: main.pdf
 evince main.pdf &
clean:
 @# for each .tex file, remove the extension
 @#    and delete its generated files
 @for PART in $(shell ls .tex| sed 's:.tex::g'); do
   echo ".out .nav .aux .toc .log .snm .pdf .vrb" | \
      sed "s:*:$$PART:g" | xargs rm -f;
 done

It's rather easy, let's check it target by target:

Short entry this time - next: using source code from within LaTeX.

LaTeX: including documents

Published 2009-07-07

This is a post from my LaTeX series - check the others too!

So far we've seen some of LaTeX advantages, and a few basic commands to get you started. Let's see a trick to be more proficient with it:

Including other tex files

You should be able to write some simple documents now, some in LyX, some in LaTeX, but you'll soon start to notice that using a single text file to create a large document becomes cumbersome. Even more so if you need to split the work between several people in a team.

There's an easy way to keep a main file and then several, smaller, files in which you can work more comfortably:

include{file.tex}

Easy, right?

Beware, you can't use an include inside an include. Why? No idea, but there's a way around this:

input{file.tex}

Quick preview

Using includes has another advantage: you can have a quick preview while working with a chapter at a time. I usually keep the following structure within my projects:

% Header declarations
% Include packages
% Document preamble
% ...
%input{chapter1.tex}
%input{chapter2.tex}
input{chapter3.tex}
% input{chapter4.tex}

Just uncomment the chapter you're working with. In big documents this has a very noticeable effect, as compiling a large LaTeX file into an enormous pdf document (several MBs) may be quite slow.

Of course, I use "input" in my main file so I can use include in the chapters themselves. I won't usually need to include other documents inside the chapters, it'd get quite messy, but it's necessary to work with embedded documents, as we'll see in another post.

LaTeX: Including Source Code

Published 2009-07-09

I'm sure every programmer has had to include source code in a document at least once, an architecture documentation for example, or perhaps as part of a presentation (beamer FTW, coming soon!). With most document formats including source code usually means writing the code and use some kind of manual syntax higlighting. Of course, any time you change the source you'll need to manualy update the document.

In LaTeX there's an easy way to handle source code. Though it was difficult to figure out, once in place this requires no maintenance at all - no need to manually syntax highlight your code nor update any files other than the source code itself. Even more, you can even change the source code language and it won't even matter in the presentation.

Preliminars

You'll need "pygmentyze" which is provided by the package python-pygments:

apt-cache search pygment
python-pygments - syntax highlighting package written in Python
sudo apt-get install python-pygments

Using it is really easy, check the manpage. Anyway, I'm too lazy to generate the syntax highlighted document by hand, let's add it to the makefile.

Automating the source code generation

Let's beging by adding a "code" folder inside our project. We'll store there all the source code files, and having them in a separated folder will enable us to add a target in the makefile to automatically update the source code in the LaTeX file.

Remember the makefile from a couple of posts back? Let's add a target:

# Hack to make it work when foo.code => foo.code.tex
code/%.tex: code/%. code/%.aux code/%.tex
  @rm code/.aux
 $(MAKE) -C .
code/%.tex: code/%.
 pygmentize -f latex -O style='border=#000000,colorful,linenos=1' $< > $@
# Search each code file to format and include
CODE_FILES:=$(shell ls code/|egrep -v '.tex$ |.aux$ ' )
CODE_FILES_DEP:=$(addprefix code/, $(CODE_FILES))
CODE_FILES_TGT:=$(addsuffix .tex, $(basename $(CODE_FILES_DEP)))
main.pdf: $(shell ls .tex) $(CODE_FILES_TGT)
  pdflatex main.tex > /dev/null

OK, maybe a couple more than one. It may seem like a lot of makefile code but all it does is define a code directory and a target to run pygmentize on each source file found there. We'll have to add a dependency in the document's target so it'll be automatically generated with each build:

main.pdf: code_frames *.tex
  pdflatex main.tex && pdflatex main.tex

and then, we'll need to clean up the new temp files:

code_clean:
 @rm -f $(CODE_FILES_TGT) code/*.aux

Don't worry, there's a link to the full makefile.

At last!

It shouldn't have been too much work and we're done anyway. To include a source code file in your document now use the include command (like include{code/foobar.cpp) and re build. I'm attaching a complete example in a zip file, with my latest implementation of a bogosort algorithm (now 50% faster).

In reply to this post, Anonymous commented @ 2010-02-14T21:25:57.000+01:00:

You can use the package listings too.

Original published here.