LaTeX

From PrattWiki
Revision as of 01:15, 6 September 2006 by DukeEgr93 (talk | contribs)
Jump to navigation Jump to search
LaTeX
Download On Unix
Web Page Site


LaTeX is a document preparation system written by Don Knuth (TeX) and extended by Leslie Lamport. It is a powerful, and free, way to generate professional, dynamic documents.

External Links

  • Andrew Roberts' "Getting to grips with LaTeX" tutorial
  • The Comprehensive LaTeX Symbol List, Scott Pakin (PDF, over 100 pages!)
  • Short Math Guide for LaTeX, Michael Downes (PDF, 17 pages)

FAQ

What do I do if LaTeX just sits there?

Hitting CTRL-C, then x and return, will always get out of LaTeX regardless of the error

What did I do wrong?

Generally, LaTeX will try to tell you - look closely at the error message LaTeX gives you

What is Underfull hbox -10000?

It's a warning that something is a bit thin - generally a table or a figure. Don't worry about these at all.

  • Why does LaTeX think my align or align* environment is messed up? I have checked it thousands of time and it looks good to me!

Make sure there are no blank lines within the environment. For some reason align hates those. The following, for example, causes problems:

\begin{align}
a\\

b
\end{align} 

Also - it may be in a line above the end of the align environment. You can use % in front of a line of LaTeX code to turn that whole line into a comment - doing that, you can find which line is having a bad day and correct it.

My \pagebreak doesn't...page...break Why?

Make sure there is ablank line after the \pagebreak command; that is:

blah
\pagebreak

more blah