TeX/LaTeX

Introduction

I spent many hours with MS Word trying to get a nice, well formed and structured document. Finally, I got a stylesheet that looked neat (that was hard!! title, ToC, bibliography, headers, footers, title structure, etc. -> PANIC!). But while my documents grew larger and I imported a couple of high resolving pictures, WYSIWYG Editor Word let my computer get slower and slower. The included pictures made troubles, they never appeared where they should. More PANIC!

• Question 1: From the time when I have defined my stylesheet, why do I have to see my document layouted?
• Question 2: Do I want to hang my document on the wall or do I want it to be read?

So, I tried this old-fashioned markup text based TeX/LaTeX. And it is awesome! I am able to publish perfectly layouted documents and it works just fine. TeX is said to have no bugs (well it is really old enough ;-)).

To save your time, I have listed all important links that you need to run LaTeX on your windows system.

Installation

This is the most common way to install a TeX/LaTeX environment on your winows system.

• Step 1: Download and install a TeX implementation. ->MiKTeX
• Step 2: Download and install a front end (GUI) for the MiKTeX distribution. ->WinEdt

Start

To start writing your documents with TeX/LaTeX, I recommend you "The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX" by Tobias Oetiker or "LaTeX 2e Kurzbeschreibung" by Schmidt and Knappen.

Useful Packages

A very useful package is the "KOMA-Script". It provides new document classes that fit to the european typesetting standards.
This german tutorial explains how to install the KOMA-Script package.

More Information

• Installation eines TeX-Gesamtsystems aus MiKTeX (2.1.9), GhostScript (7.04), GSview (4.2) und dem Editor WinEdt (5.3) für Windows 95/98/NT/2000/XP
• TeX and LaTeX
• TeX Users Group
• GNU TeXmacs
• LaTeX Project
• DANTE, Deutschsprachige Anwendervereinigung TeX e.V.
• wiki: CategoryTeX