TeX and LaTeX

TeX and LaTeX are free software professional typesetting packages which are, sadly, little known in the world of Windows computing but are almost ubiquitous in Unix environments and especially in scientific publishing.

I first started using LaTeX (the most common interface to the plain TeX rendering system) for project reports in my 3rd year undergraduate work and immediately wished I'd discovered it earlier. If you've ever experienced the pain of trying to maintain coherent header and paragraph formatting in MS Word for documents over ~30 pages long you'll know what I mean. I won't even attempt to describe how nasty Word is when it comes to equation typesetting or the numbering and positioning of tables and figures!

LaTeX is especially nice for typesetting mathematical work — it has beautiful maths fonts and extremely powerful tools for handling tables of contents/figures/etc, citations, bibliographies and indices. The interface is more like programming than the Word-like "WYSIWYG" approach but the initial learning curve isn't too steep and is worth the effort.

Here's some TeX-related links that might be of interest:

I'll chuck a link to the "Not So Short Guide to LaTeX" on here sometime — it's a good initial reference. For more advanced features, the standard books on LaTeX (as well as TeX and Metafont) are:

The TeXbook — Donald Knuth
The Metafont Book — Donald Knuth
LaTeX, a document preparation system — Leslie Lamport
The LaTeX Companion — Goosens et al
The LaTeX Graphics Companion — Goosens et al
The LaTeX Web Companion — Goosens et al

There's plenty of others but these are the ones I've used in the past and found to be useful. I'm told that the Kopka and Daly "A Guide to LaTeX" book is the best of the lot, though...

LaTeX / BibTeX style files

There wouldn't be any point in me having this page if I didn't supply anything other than TeX-sycophancy, so here's a few LaTeX style files and other random things that I've been using for recent bits of work. Writing your own packages is quite easy and very worthwhile. One not-so-obvious trick is to set the TEXINPUTS and BIBINPUTS environment variables to include both the current directory (.) and the location of these packages and BibTeX reference files. Both are standard Unix colon-delimited path set strings... i.e. something that looks like /path/to/number/1:/path/to/number/2:..

TEXINPUTS is the search path for the kpathsea library used to carry out the TeX/LaTeX path resolution. Personally, I just have a standard texmf/tex/latex/ directory tree with subdirectories containing each non-standard class and package and I tell kpathsea to recursively search this directory by putting a double-slash (//) on the end of the search path. The same goes for the BIBINPUTS and BSTINPUTS variables, where the tree paths are typically texmf/bibtex/bib/ and texmf/bibtex/bst/ for BibTeX "*.bib" database files and "*.bst" style files respectively. The variable names match up to file types precisely as you'd expect!


  export TEXINPUTS=".:/path/to/texinputs//";
  export LATEXINPUTS=$TEXINPUTS;
  export BIBINPUTS=".:/path/to/bibinputs//";
  export BSTINPUTS=".:/path/to/bstinputs//";

Anyway, here's those packages:

Useful TeX packages

Here's a list of the most useful standard LaTeX packages (in my experience) and what they do:

bm — `proper' handling of bold maths symbols
draftcopy
color / xcolor
boxedminipage
braket
a4wide
xspace
tabularx
url
verbatim and fancyvrb
fancyhdr
axodraw (see also Jaxodraw Java program) and feynmf
amsmath
SIunits
chem
timing
slashed / cancel
cite
citesort
graphicx — modern LaTeX (at least pdflatex) supports PNG and JPEG images

I've also written a bunch of LaTeX packages specifically for high-energy physics (though several are of more general use). I'll document them soon: you might want to take a look at http://hepforge.cedar.ac.uk/heptex/ in case I forget to update this page.

Writing LaTeX macros, packages and classes

One of the most powerful features of LaTeX is its customisability: you can write your own macros to enforce consistency through your documents and improve the source code readability (as well as the benefits of single-source macros definitions when it comes to redefinitions). These macros can then be stored in "style" packages for convenience and you can define entire document classes which automatically set the document appearance as required and provide appropriate macro definitions. Hiding all the mechanics of this makes for much more elegant LaTeX source.

Anyway, here's a few hints and tips on how this sort of thing can be done consistently and flexibly:

Don't be afraid to write your own packages (*.sty files): you'll only need to know a few extra commands to make them robust and the encapsulation is well worth it.
Use \xspace and \ensuremath round most things that you might ever want to put in a math environment. Remember that math mode ignores spaces, so if you want to combine the two (which is such an idiom that you may want to define a macro wrapper for it) you'll need something like this, \newcommand{\goesto}{\ensuremath{\to}\xspace} i.e. so the \xspace is outside the \ensuremath scope.


  
    Use the amsmath package for its \text macro, which will appropriately
    match the font of text in math mode to the surrounding paragraph text. Putting your
    macros which do this in a package which requires amsmath means that you don't
    need to remember to include the \usepackage{amsmath} in your own documents.
  
  
    Other things: \providecommand, personal macros as derived from generic macros,
    \renewcommand, \renewenvironment, \let and recursion problems, \AtBeginDocument,
    passing parameters to the class, executing at the end of the class defn, specifying a
    LaTeX version and a package version, \ProvidesPackage, landscape idiom, \RequirePackage

TeX and LaTeX

LaTeX / BibTeX style files

agbpresent class

agbstd package

agbhep package

agbmath package

Useful TeX packages

Writing LaTeX macros, packages and classes

`agbpresent` class

`agbstd` package

`agbhep` package

`agbmath` package