A Documentation Guide
This page is an attempt at a guided tour around the huge amount of TeX
and LaTeX documentation which comes as part of teTeX, the unix TeX and
LaTeX system assembled by Thomas Esser. It is contributed by Keith Refson and all
comments, suggestions and flames should be directed to him. Queries about
installing and maintaining the teTeX
installation itself should be directed to the teTeX mailing
list: tetex@informatik.uni-hannover.de (send mail to majordomo@informatik.uni-hannover.de
containing the lines subscribe tetex to join) and questions
about using LaTeX, TeX etc are best asked on the usenet
newsgroup comp.text.tex.
Much of the documentation is in the form of dvi and PostScript
files which should display using xdvi or ghostscript
from a properly configured web browser. Alternatively you may
download and print them. The original LaTeX sources can be found in
the documentation tree which is rooted at $TEXMFMAIN/doc.
Guides to TeX and LaTeX
LaTeX2e is the recommended version of LaTeX, and the older version
LaTeX 2.09 is obsolete. If you know LaTeX2.09 read about LaTeX2e vs LaTeX2.09 and why you
should switch. There are two manuals describing the LaTeX language
itself, which may at a pinch substitute for a book, a concise manual
entitled Essential LaTeX an a
fuller "not so short" Introduction
to LaTeX2e. There is also a full reference manual
of LaTeX2e commands -- ideal for looking up a particular piece of
formatting while writing a document (also available in dvi format) and a table of
available mathematical symbols.
Useful information in a questions and aswers format is provided by
the UK TeX users group Frequently Asked Questions
list.
Most LaTeX books refer to a local guide to describe
operating-system and implementation-dependent aspects, notably the
commands to invoke LaTeX and how to preview and print documents. The
document Running LaTeX and utilities
on a Unix system (also in PostScript form) is a good
introduction to most of these topics.
There are errata lists available for two well-known books,
the LaTeX Book and the LaTeX Companion. (A complete revision of
Chapter 8 of The LaTeX Companion is also available
from CTAN courtesy of the publisher, Addison-Wesley.)
Graphics and Colour
A very common requirement is to
include some kind of graphics as an external file (usually PostScript)
into a LaTeX document. The definitive manual on how to do this is
Keith Reckdahl's excellent Using
EPS graphics in LaTeX2e (also available in PDF format). The document Packages in the
graphics bundle (also in dvi format) is the
documentation on the recommended LaTeX2e graphics package,
which includes information on how to use colours in the output.
A very powerful additional capability is provided by the psfrag system (also in dvi format). This allows you to
import PostScript figures from any other package, but use LaTeX's
power for all of the mathematical and textual annotations. (But note
that xfig(1) allows you to do this anyway).
Graph and Diagram Drawing
Probably the best way to draw a simple diagram is to use the
xfig program (see the unix man page for details). However
there are programmatic ways for more sophisticated work. These are
- xypic
- there is also a reference manual.
- texdraw
- There are examples in the directory generic/texdraw/.
- Pstricks
- a set of macros for performing fancy twiddles
using PostScript, such as drawing of geometrical objects, diagrams,
fancy boxes, grayscales etc. There is a User Guide (
part 1,
part 2,
part 3,
part 4),
a
quick reference card
and examples in the directory
generic/pstricks.
- METAPOST
- a development of Donald Knuth's METAFONT program
which produces PostScript rendition of fonts, diagrams etc rather than
bitmapped versions. Documentation includes a manual (also in dvi format) and a guide to plotting graphs (dvi) using METAPOST.
LaTeX Packages
These packages control the visual appearance and formatting of LaTeX
documents. Many of them are described in the book The LaTeX
Companion and they are grouped here in accordance with the
headings defined there.
This installation contains the packages listed below.
Many more have been written to provide additional capabilities and are
available for download from the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network
server, abbreviated to CTAN.
Here is the Catalogue of
packages available from CTAN.
Document Structure
- xr
- Page references to external documents.
- varioref
- "Intelligent" page references.
- lastpage
- Reference the number of pages in your LaTeX document (as in a
page footer that says: Page N of M)
- hyperref
- Create hypertext documents in dvi or PDF form.
- KOMA-script
- A drop-in replacement for the article/report/book classes with
emphasis on European rules of typography and paper formats as laid
down by Jan Tschichold. The article class, for example, becomes scrartcl.
Formatting Tools
- bm
- The right way to make bold mathematical symbols.
- xspace
- Define commands
that don't eat spaces.
- moreverb
- A verbatim
mode that can handle TABs properly, can number lines, can number
lines in an included file, can produce boxed verbatims, etc.
- verbatim
- A better verbatim environment.
- picinpar
- Insert pictures into paragraphs. (NOTE: Piet van Oostrum does
not recommend this package. Picins is recommended instead.
- multicol
- LaTeX package to mix single and multiple columns. Allows you
to shift between two and one columns anywhere.
- ftnright
- Customze placement of footnotes in two column documents.
- enumerate
- Adds an optional argument to the enumerate environment which
determines the style in which the counter is printed.
- indentfirst
- Indent first paragraph after section header.
- algorithms
- Defines a floating algorithm environment designed to work with
the algorithmic package.
- textfit
- Package to support fitting of text to a given width of height
by scaling the font.
- typehtml
- Typeset HTML (i.e., World Wide Web documents) directly from LaTeX.
Page Layout
- geometry
- Customise page layout (page sizes) using an easy and flexible
user interface. Example gtest.tex generates
a testpage.
- fancyheadings
- This package has been superceded by fancyhdr.
- fancyhdr
- Support for sophisticated control of page headers and footers
in LaTeX2e. It supercedes fancyheadings.
- footnpag
- Allows footnotes on individual pages to be numbered from 1, rather than being numbered sequentially through the document.
- layout
- Generate a test page showing the page layout.
- a4
- Mostly superceded by LaTeX2e support for a4 paper but defines the extra option of widemargins. The geometry package is usually better.
- anysize
- Another package to set page sizes. Superceded by Geometry.
Tables
- array
- An extended implementation of the array and tabular
environments which implements options to format columns.
- longtable
- Support for tables longer than a page
- delarray
- Add delimiters (parentheses etc.) around arrays.
- supertabular
- A multi-page tables package.
- dcolumn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
- Bdesignn
- Align on the decimal point of numbers in tabulars.
- hhline
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