LaTeX is a high-quality typesetting system designed for the production of technical and scientific documentation. LaTeX is the de facto standard for the communication and publication of scientific documents.

Obtaining LaTeX

Latex is freely available.  Under windows, MikTex provides an easy to install, very complete LaTeX distribution.  For Mac OS, the MacTex distribution is recommended.  Most Linux distributions include packages for LaTeX in their package management system.

Getting Started

There are several excellent guides on the LaTeX site to help you get started, of these The (Not So) Short Introduction to LaTeX2e is particularly good.

There are also a number of good books available, including

• Grätzer, G. (2000). Math Into LaTeX. Birkhäuser Boston.
• Grätzer, G. (2007). More Math Into LaTeX. Springer.
• Kottwitz, S. (2011). LaTeX Beginner’s Guide. Packt Publishing.
• Mittelbach, F., Goossens, M., Braams, J., Carlisle, D., & Rowley, C. (2004). The LaTeX Companion. Addison-Wesley Professional.

Packages

Packages customize the behaviour of  LaTeX; most LaTeX distributions include a broad range of packages and many more can be found at CTAN.  Some of the more important packages to be aware of are

• amsmath – more convenient mathematics
• TikZ – sophisticated diagrams

Editors

Using an editor that understands LaTeX syntax can greatly simplify the task of writing documents in LaTeX.  Some editors that provide LaTeX support are

• LyX
• TeXworks
• TeXShop (Mac OS only)
• TeXmaker
• Emacs