LaTeX: Basics and Reports, Articles and Slides

Release 1.19
Thu Oct 18 08:05:38 2001

1 Introduction

This guide to L^ATEX will introduce you to the basic concepts all you need afterwards is the not so short guide to L^ATEX found on the internet and probably the two most important books: The Lion Book (LaTeX introduction by Leslie Lamport) and the Dog Book (The LaTeX Companion by ...).

Including the basic concepts it will also cover the topics of setting up your report to format and print nicely, make your 7th semester articles look perfect and make equations look brilliant when presenting your slides. Letters to mom ``asking for more bread'' will not be forgotten...

Each autumn semester one mini-course will be held in using L^ATEX to write and format your reports. Materials can be found there which can form the basis of your report or your article

L^ATEX Course Materials

You will find templates for a Institute of Electronic Systems report which already include a lot of the tips included in this guide, a full article written using one of the supported article styles, other helpful documentation, and links to other webpages.

2 Basics

Overview

Whenever you are getting ready to write a document consider formatting it with L^ATEXwhatever the type of document you are writing. The following sections will present you with reports, articles, slides or letters covering most of your needs as a student, teacher or researcher. This section will deal with the different commands you have to execute to format, convert and print your LaTeX documents.

You start by creating a TEX file (suffix is named .tex) which you are able to convert to either DVI, Postscript, PDF or HTML. The DVI is used to view your document on-screen, Postscript files can either be printed or priviewed, PDF is an portable and compact way to give access your document on the internet and last HTML is good for web pages.

Several command line programs are available for formatting your document and convert it to the right format. Please spend some time to get yourself accustomed to the names of the programs and the result they produce.

                       LaTeX Document (.tex)
                                |
        +-----------------------+---------------------------+
        |                       |                           |
   DVI File (.dvi)        PDF Document (.pdf)       HTML File (.html)
        |
        |
   Postscript File (.ps)
        |
        |
   PDF File (.pdf)

Several different programs are involved and will be explained in the following subsections.

Format your Document

You have created a document abc.tex (with no formatting errors in it) and you want to process it

  alfred@lada> latex abc

or more laborously

  alfred@lada> latex abc.tex

If no errors are met inside the abc.tex file the result will be the abc.dvi. This file is the first step to print your document or create either Postscript or PDF from it.

Several other files might also be the result of the processing of the TeX document. These might be log files (.log and .blg), intermediate files for generating cross references (.aux files) or list of tables or figures or table of contents (.lof, .lot, or .toc files). When you have the result you want you do not need these files anymore.

Another issue worth mentioning is that you might have to run latex several times in order to have the correctly formatted result. The latex program will tell you if reruns are needed. For large reports usually above 150 pages op to four or five reruns can be needed, but in normal conditions latex need only to be run single or twice.

  +---------+     +-------------+     +---------+
  | abc.tex |---->| `latex abc' |---->| abc.dvi |
  +---------+     +-------------+     +---------+

Preview or View the Document

When you have formatted your LaTeX document correctly run it through xdvi to preview it.

  alfred@lada> xdvi abc

When you start the XDvi application, you are able to browse through the pages you have created. By clicking on the left, middle and right mouse button you are able to zoom smaller to larger areas of the pages previewed.

XDvi has many keyboard shortcuts (callede keystrokes in the manual page) which are available with

  alfred@lada> man xdvi

Please be aware of the following normal keyboard shortcuts:

  q   -- quit
  n   -- next page
  p   -- previous page
  g # -- goto page number #
  s # -- shrink factor #, zoom to #
  G   -- greyscale toogle

Please note that XDvi may show eps figures wrongly sometimes. Don't be alarmed - the figures will look correct on the printed output!

Print the Document

When you have previewed your document all you often need is to print it with dvips or lpr for more special printing needs. The program dvips is a DVI to Postscript converter and can either print directly or output to a file. The following prints to default printer

  alfred@lada> dvips abc.dvi

and this will print to the printer ``lwa51'':

 alfred@lada> dvips -Plwa51 abc.dvi

Dvips have many interesting options for converting DVI files to Postscript files eg. printing crop marks for non-standard page sizes, range of pages to print, selection of papertype, etc.

The most used function is output to a file:

  alfred@lada> dvips -o abc.ps abc.dvi

which generate a Postscript file from the DVI file. The postscript file is used to verify that the upcoming print is OK, but other interesting options apply to Postscript including:

Print 2-up pages (convert pages to A5 and put two of them on a single A4 for printouts which result in only half the actual amount printed):
```
  alfred@lada> psnup -2 abc.ps abc-2up.ps
```
or even 4-up pages
```
  alfred@lada> psnup -4 abc.ps abc-4up.ps
```
which really saves the actual amount of pages printed,
Convert to PDF files which translates the Postscript to the internet friendly and platform independent PDF format. Two different programs exists - from Adobe comes:
```
  alfred@lada> distill abc.ps abc.pdf
```
and from Alladan Ghostscript comes:
```
  alfred@lada> ps2pdf abc.ps abc.pdf
```
Convert to books, booklet or leaflets using the Postscript utilities (psutils software package). You need to convert a series of A4 single-sided pages into a A5 booklet with double-sided pages where the A4 pages are transformed into A5 pages. It can be done by first creating a normal A4 page. Perhaps you are going to use the scale package to make the A5 pages look realistic.
```
  alfred@lada> latex booklet.tex
  alfred@lada> latex booklet.tex
```
The A4 pages have to be converted into landscape A5 pages during the DVI to Postscript proces
```
  alfred@lada> dvips -t landscape -x 707 -o booklet-a5-landscape.ps booklet.dvi
```
The next part needs you to distribute or rearrange the A5 pages into signatures which is needed if you print books or booklets. Here it is very important that your docuemnt consists of a multiplum of four (4) pages; the rearrangement proces have to take an argument of a multiplum of four pages. For the example we will have thirty-two (32)
```
  alfred@lada> psbook -s32 booklet-a5-landscape.ps booklet-a5-book.ps
```
The last conversion will copy two A5 Postscript pages onto one and align the two pages on the A4 media.
```
  alfred@lada> pstops '2:0(7.44mm,7.44mm)+1(7.44mm,-141.06mm)' \
     booklet-a5-book.ps booklet.ps
```
All the Postscript output can be viewed with Ghostview (gv, ghostview). To print the booklet.ps you have to use a short duplex enabled printer
```
  alfred@lada> lpr -P lw -Z sduplex booklet.ps
```
You are all done with the booklet.

Convert to a HTML File

Whenever you need to convert part of your texts to HTML, which you want to present on the web, you can also use LaTeX documents (they can also be converted to HTML).

  alfred@lada> latex2html abc.tex

The software package LaTeX2HTML have many parts which can be configured to do what you want. Please consult the manual pages for more information. Most things have to do with how to present the HTML pages, how to translate mathematics and what to do about header, footer and navigational parts of the HTML pages produced.

Another option that you have with translating HTML is called dlh, but is not nearly as advaned as Latex2HTML.

  alfred@lada> dlh abc.tex

DLH cannot convert mathematics but is good at converting smaller documents for the web.

3 Reports

You can use the parts of this document to get the overview of how to structure your LaTeX report, but you will have to look elsewhere for the syntax of LaTeX (the Lion Book by Leslie Lamport). Here you will be provided with help and tricks on how to set up the basic report, divide your report into a multifile document and how to provide your document with report specificnesses.

Basic Document

Your basic report document will look like

  \documentclass{report}

  \title{Basic Report}
  \author{Your Name}
  \date{\today}

  \begin{document}
  \maketitle
  \tableofcontents

  \end{document}

which provide you with a front page, table of contents and the first chapter without text. You can save the text and commands in a file called firstreport.tex and run latex on it several times and end up with your first report.

Minimum LaTeX Packages

There exists a minimum of required packages that you will need to use in order to get a high quality report

  \documentclass[12pt,danish,a4paper]{report}
  \usepackage{t1enc}    # danish letters
  \usepackage{babel}    # danish hyphenation
  \usepackage{geometry} # page layout and A4 paper
  \begin{document}

If you stick to those packages you will get decent performance from LaTeX for the first few weeks, when you begin using it.

Next Few Packages

Minimum packages got you set up with LaTeX but to get on with polishing the layout you need some more packages and tune them

  \usepackage{fancyhdr}
  \usepackage{booktabs}
  \usepackage[hang,bf,small]{caption}

If you are in need for more formatting then please consult the ``Dog Book'', also reffered to as the L^ATEX Companion. It provides information on almost all basic L^ATEX Packages and advanced too.

The fancy header package gives you control over the header and footers. With that package you can easily control which information goes where. The following might look a bit technical but is easy to use if you read the L^ATEX Companion

  \pagestyle{fancy}%
  \renewcommand{\headrulewidth}{0.3pt}
  \renewcommand{\footrulewidth}{0pt}
  \renewcommand{\chaptermark}[1]{\markboth{#1}{}}
  \renewcommand{\sectionmark}[1]{\markright{#1}{}}
  \fancyhf{}
  \fancyhead[LE,RO]{\sffamily\bfseries\thepage}
  \fancyhead[LO]{\sffamily\bfseries\rightmark}
  \fancyhead[RE]{\sffamily\bfseries\leftmark}
  \fancyfoot{}

Basicly it creates fancy pages with a horizontal line beneath the header and no line above the footer. On even pages it puts pagenumber to the left header and chapter name on the right header. On odd pages it puts pagenumber on the right header and section name on the left header. It enables you to produce very nice reports which are printed on both sides. This has already been taken care of with the latexreport.tar.gz template.

The booktabs package enable you to create professional level tables in your articles and reports. Please consult the information on booktabs by issuing

  alfred@lada> texdoc booktabs

and look at the examples in latexreport.tar.gz. For many other L^ATEX packages you can do similar with the texdoc command.

The caption package looks different than the other used packages in that it has options. Documentation on packages, either directly or from the L^ATEX companion, include options for pacakges which you can use to configure the behaviour of a certain package. It will modify how your report is formatted. Captions are texts which follow either tables or figures and the caption package is a central place to modify the formatting of captions. The options [hang,bf,small] will create hanging, small bold-face font captions. You can change it to provide the setup you want.

Synopsis and Abstract with AAU Logo

All reports which are written at Institute of Electronic Systems have a history of including a specific ``synopsis'' and a ``abstracts'' page. Since they are formatted in a very specific way they are not always easy to reproduce with L^ATEX. The latexreport.tar.gz template includes a full setup for a Danish synopsis and an English abstract. Look at the contents of the file

  latexreport/text/frontmatter.tex

You are more than welcome to use them for your own purposes as long as you remember to change the contents. They can be used both with the template and with your own setup of a report template.

Table of Contents, List of Figures and List of Tables

To include these often needed lists please include the following into your report

  \tableofcontents
  \listoffigures
  \listoftables

They will provide you with the needed results. You will end up with at least three different pages each with a table of contents, a list of figures, and a list of tables.

New Items in TOC

Also you might need to include a header for a un-numbered section into the table of contents (un-numbered sections are not normally included into the table of contents). This is the case if you have a colophon or the bibliography, which is an un-numbered section, that goes into the table of contents:

  \addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{\numberline{}\bibname}

  \addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{\numberline{}Colophon}

4 Articles

Traditionally students at the 7th semester at Institute of Electronic Systems have to write an article instead of a report. Different styles have been suggested and they are all installed in the tetex distribution found at Department of Communication Technology.

Article Styles

Writing an article instead requires you to change the document class. Normally the document class is report and for the general case you can change it to article. Most scientific journals and conference proceedings have their own L^ATEX document class which you must use.

The different article document classes installed for wriring articles are: elsart abd ifacmtg. Use these names instead of article or report document classes. Most people use just article in the beginning ana later change to the specific document class that is needed.

Find more information about the L^ATEX article styles at

Elsevier Science: Preparing Articles With L^ATEX

Article Class elsart

You begin an elsart article by using the instructions found in ies-local-texmf/tex/latex/elsart and with a document like this

  \documentclass{elsart}
  \usepackage{natbib}
  \begin{document}
  ...
  elsart specific latex commands
  ...
  contents
  ...
  \end{document}

You must take care when you prepare the article to put in the correct information about the article, keywords, authors, addresses, and the like. Please also take care to read the sections of their documentation containing information how to insert Postscript figures, show equations and creating normal sections like bibliographies and table of contents.

Article Class ifacmtg

You begin an ifacmtg article by using the instructions found in ies-local-texmf/tex/latex/ifacmtg and with a document like this

  \documentclass{ifacmtg}
  \bibliographystyle{ifac}
  \usepackage[dcucite]{harvard}
  \begin{document}
  ...
  ifacmtg specific latex commands
  ...
  article contents
  ...
  \end{document}

Since the ifacmtg is similar to elsart, the guidelines and other documentation for authors, mentioned on the Elsevier Science site, may be helpful.

Article Example

We provide you with a realistic example of how to prepare an article using one of the available article styles. Lars Christian Hausmann has donated an article to use as a reference when you prepare your own article at the seventh semester, or when you want to prepare one as a part of your Ph. D. studies.

You can find the article example under the ``Article Example Using ifacmtg'' in the L^ATEX course area:

L^ATEX Course Materials

Unpack the article archive and run latex on the article latex files inside, view the result and browse the files to find out how you will create an article with L^ATEX yourself.

5 Slides

Prosper Package

For you to make slides using L^ATEX you have to use the very advanced latex package called prosper. You can find more information about prosper on the web

Prosper Website

The prosper package have been installed in the current tetex AFS installation at the Department of Communication Technology.

Small Example

This is a very small example that works and all you need to fill in is the L^ATEX formatted contents you need for each slide.

  \documentclass[final,a4paper,slidecolor,colorbg,%
                 pdf,total,contemporain]{prosper}

  \title{Emacs 21}
  \subtitle{Easy, Smart and Modern\ldots}
  \author{Flemming Kjær Jensen}
  \institution{Department of Communication Technology}
  \email{fkj@kom.auc.dk}

  \begin{document}
  \maketitle

  \begin{slide}{Slide Name}
    \begin{itemize}
    \item Item One
    \item Item Two
    \item Item Three
    \end{itemize}
  \end{slide}

  \end{document}

Generating Platform Independent PDF Slides

The output of L^ATEX and the prosper package is platform independent PDF files that you can bring whereever you go. You can show them on the main platforms: Unix, Windows and Apple Macintoshes.

The steps involved in generating the PDF slide documents are

  latex slide-doc.tex
  latex slide-doc.tex
  dvips -o slide-doc.ps slide-doc.dvi
  ps2pdf slide-doc.ps slide-doc.pdf

Later you can view the slides with the Acrobat Viewer

  acroread slide-doc.pdf

If you choose to animate your slides then please use a PDF viewer that supports the type of animation you need. Ie. check yourself for support.

Prosper Slide Basics

A set of slides have been created as a part of an employee course for creating conference slides using L^ATEX and prosper. Please look at these prosper introductionary slides:

L^ATEX Prosper Introduction Slides

It contains information on the basic layout on how to make slides, how to animate itemized lists (bullets), and more. More advanced information can be found in the seminar and prosper package documentation.

6 Figures

In L^ATEX figures are inserted using the Encapsulated Postscript (.eps) format. If you can convert your images or figures to EPS then you can also use them in L^ATEX. Most modern day Windows programs can export to EPS, or you can make a screenshot of the image and later convert it to Postscript. Most Unix programs can output Postscript or EPS format. See later how to convert to EPS format on Unix.

The graphics Package

The graphics package is the standard package to include in your reports or articles

  \usepackage{graphics}

It supports basic inclusion of graphics into a L^ATEX document. It has been superceded by the graphicx package. We will focus on that.

The graphicx Package

To use the extended or enhanced graphics package do

  \usepackage{graphicx}

The graphicx supports the use of colors, scaling and rotation of EPS files, and much more. The command options are very simple to use compared to the standard graphics package. Examples follow.

Graphics Package Documentation

For documentation on both the graphics and graphicx packages do the following

  alfred@lada> texdoc grfguide

Insert Figure as a Float

To directly insert an EPS file into a document you have to use this command

  \includegraphics{file.eps}

To insert a figure as a ``float'' into a document (this is the correct way of insert figures into a report) please

  \begin{figure}[htbp]
    \centering
    \includegraphics{file.eps}
    \caption{Example figure of a EPS file}
    \label{fig:example}
  \end{figure}

Rotate and Scale Figure

If you need to rotate or scale an inserted figure use some of the options available for the includegraphics command

  \includegraphics[scale=.75,angle=45]{file.eps}

Convert Image to EPS File

For Unix the ImageMagick software package contains advanced software for image conversion. Please use the convert program to convert your images to EPS before using them with L^ATEX.

  alfred@lada> convert file.jpeg file.eps

For more information on the convert program issue this command

  alfred@lada> man convert

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