Getting to grips with LaTeX - writing

Here are some tutorials I have written for getting up to speed with this excellent document processing system. Funnily enough I wouldn't consider myself an expert, per se, but I'm learning all the time. I recall finding it quite taxing when I started to learn LaTeX, which is why I have started these tutorials. However, I hope that my experience plays to your advantage because I cover sort of questions and problems I had when I first learning LaTeX which are probably typical for most beginners. Benefits LaTeX pre-dates modern graphical word processors, if not modern graphical operating systems! For a more detailed account, see my article regarding the numerous advantages. Tutorials

Quick install - TeX Live If you don't want to bother reading the full install documentation and just want to install everything in TeX Live, on a Unix-like system, a minimal recipe follows. Special considerations for Windows are described separately. For MacOSX, we recommend installing MacTeX, which contains all of TeX Live (and a few Mac-specific additions). Cygwin users can follow the instructions for Unix-like systems, but make sure you have the Cygwin prerequisites before beginning the installation. Pre-install: download, cleanup A separate page describes various ways to acquire the software. If you're re-installing after a previous attempt, be sure to completely remove your old installation. rm -rf /usr/local/texlive/2013 rm -rf ~/.texlive2013 Running the installer You do not need to be root (administrator on Windows) to install, use, or manage TeX Live. Once you have the software, run the install-tl script to install (comments are in italics): cd /your/download/directory . Choosing a download host Testing

TeX Users Group (TUG) home page tlmgr user mode | There and back again Starting from tomorrow, tlpretest will contain an extension to the TeX Live Manager called User Mode. This one probably one of the most asked features in recent times, that one can use tlmgr to manage arbitrary texmf trees. Although there are still many things to be improved, the current status already allows users to install many packages, even without write access to the main TeX installation. The TeX Live Manager tlmgr has been since long the main tool for configuration and management of a TeX Live installation. In contrast to the normal installation of TeX Live from TUG, repackaged versions of TeX Live for distributions (Debian, SuSE, Fedora, ...) normally do not ship the tlmgr, as it would interfere with the normal package manager. Well, here it is now. A short walk through how to do things. Initializing the user tree The first thing to be done is initializing the user tree. The first thing to call is tlmgr --init-usertree Installation of packages Now installation is quite easy: