Some Notes about LaTeX

LaTeX is a professional system to write documents. This page presents a few packages for it that I found useful. I don’t intend to give an introduction here. See The not so Short Introduction to LaTeX 2ε for that.

General Information

Few people know that LaTeX is self-documenting. There’s a texdoc command that will give information on many packages. A full list of the packages is included in most distributions. In Debian, it can be found at /usr/share/doc/texmf/help/Catalogue/brief.html. Another useful document is The Comprehensive LaTeX Symbol List, which lists all the symbols you will ever need.

Document Classes

When viewed from the point of view of a typographer, the default LaTeX document classes are found lacking. There are two document classes that produce much better results. I like KOMA-Script and use it extensively. It is included in most distributions, and usually only requires to use scrartcl (script article)instead of article as a document class to work. The other nice document class is Memoir. I recommend the Memoir manual as a good introduction to typography in general.

Packages

The following packages are included in teTeX. See the documentation of each for a longer explanation.

ngerman

Translate generated headers etc. to German.

\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}

Allow accented characters in the document encoded in the latin-1 character set. No more having to write "a.

eurosym

Allow \euro to enter the Euro symbol (€).

amsmath

All the mathematical symbols you ever needed.

url

A special verbatim environment which allows line breaks at sane places.

booktabs

Typographically enhanced tabular environment.

longtable

A tabular environment that allows page breaks.

enumerate

Enhanced enumerations. As an example, the following works and produces an enumeration with a), b) etc.:

\begin[a)]{enumerate}
\item foo
\item bar
\end{enumerate}

pst-node

Draw lines, curves and arrows between different elements of a page. See texdoc pst-usr3 for more information.

graphics, graphicx, color

Gaphical stuff and colors for your document. See

texdoc
      grfguide

, but don’t overuse this.

tipa

Phonetic symbols for linguists.

qtree

Drawing syntax trees.

beamer

Creating beamer presentations or slides.

BibTeX

The citations offered by default are somewhat limited. If you prefer citations using the author and date within a document, you can use natbib. This adds two new commands—\citep and \citet, producing the format of (Author 2004) or Author (2004), respectively.

If you are german and want to produce a bibliography according to DIN 1505, use natdin.