Another benefit is portability. You can use any editor in any operating system to prepare your document. The .tex files are comparably small, and you can create PDFs or PostScript files from them.
So, where to get our rubber suite?
Firstly, you need at least one package: texlive-base
You can grab a slightly bigger one with: texlive-latex-base
For Emacs users, there is an excellent environment called: whizzytex
You can also add: auctex
Of course, if you plan to work with mathematical formula, or with certain languages, you need to grad suitable packages that can display what you want: apt-cache search texlive|more
A simple document to start with
Fire up your editor of choice and create a file with .tex extension.
We first need to define what type of document we want to create, and we can also set up the font size we want to use throughout the document:
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\documentclass[12pt,a4paper]{article}
Let's also add some meta information, like the title and the author of our document, along with a date.
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\title{My First Encounter With BDSM}
\author{Larry Satenstein}
\date{\today}
\keywords{BDSM, Slave, Whipping, Banana}
The following tells LaTeX where the actual document begins, and where it ends.
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\begin{document}
\end{document}
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\begin{document}
\maketitle
\begin{abstract}
The abstract begins here.
This new line has no line break.
If we want a line break, we place two backslashes at the end of the line.\\Yeah.
\end{abstract}
\section{Introduction}
This is the introduction. All sections will be enumerated automatically.
\begin{itemize}
\item \emph{Some item in italics.}
\item And a regular one
\end{itemize}
\paragraph{Outline}
And a paragraph.
\bibliography{main}
\end{document}
To create a PDF from this .tex file run:
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pdflatex file.tex
- http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Document_Structure
- http://texblog.org/tex-resources/
- http://texblog.org/code-snippets/
- http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/LaTeX
Hope you find it useful ;)