Dates: Thursdays, 13, 20 and 27 February, 2pm to 4pm.
Location: Room MAL 407, Birkbeck, University of London, Malet Street, WC1E 7HX.
LaTeX is a powerful typesetting system, which is used for producing scientific and mathematical documents of high typographic quality. Unlike WYSIWYG tools such as Word, LaTeX uses plain text files that contain formatting commands. It is open-source, stable and used by many technical publishing companies (including all computer science journals). LaTeX is the de facto standard for the communication and publication of scientific documents. It is available on Microsoft Windows, MacOS, Linux and many other platforms.
LaTeX contains features for:
LaTeX is based on Donald E. Knuth's TeX typesetting language developed at Stanford University and first released in 1978. LaTeX was first developed in 1985 by Leslie Lamport.
Outline of topics to be covered:
This three-evening course will describe the use of LaTeX for typesetting documents. We begin by showing how to download and install the MiKTeX distribution and the TeXworks/WinEdt editors, which seamlessly integrate with MiKTeX. The first session will then cover the basics of document structure and preparation. Most of the second session will cover the graphical and mathematical notational aspects of the language. The third session will concentrate on creating large documents with bibliography and index (e.g., theses), as well as slides (presentations).
The sessions will be supported by practical "hands on" labs which will include instructions on how to install the software. No prior knowledge of TeX will be assumed but familiarity with Microsoft Windows will be useful for following the demonstrations and participating in the practical sessions.