Latex, Miktek, WinEdt Help

In order to work with Tex-Latex you have to have your document in the relevant language and saved in a <filname>.tex.

Help for how to write a tex or latex document and other valuable addresses can be found at: http://coulomb.ecn.purdue.edu/~bulsara/LaTeX/latex.html

You can download Miktex on your machine for free from: http://www.miktex.org/

Then :

You either use MSDOS (Command Prompt in Wndows) and the latex, pdflatex, pslatex commands or

USE WinEdt.

Using this editor is easy and fast.
That is you can edit your .tex file under the friendly environment the editor has to offer plus, you can compile your file, see the results and make changes fast.

Using the editor, you can choose one of the commands from the list on the toolbar and run your tex file, i.e. choosing "LATEX" it is like obviously like running latex in MSDOS. Then, the "DVI" icon will be enabled for you to preview with the dvi viewer YAP. Then you can either print or use the dvitops to create a postscript file that can be viewed pressing the ghostview icon. Alternatively, you can directly press the "PDFLATEX" icon to have an easy to handle pdf file.

NOTES-WARNINGS:

• Any files that are created (compiled) through WinEdt are saved in the directory where the .tex file is.
• The easiest way to include graphs in your .tex file is to import them as either eps pictures or pdf pictures.
• Use BibTex for bibliographical references. Winedt has an easy way to include an article, book etc. in the .bib file under Insert=>BiBTex items. Do not forget to include the .bib file in your .tex file and run the BiBTeX between TWO LaTex runs.

COMMENTS

PDFLaTeX instead of…
One important comment you have to consider is the fact that making a pdf file directly from your tex document using pdflatex is much better (fontwise) than using latex, dvips and then using ghostview interface for ghostscript.
(pdfwrite).

MiKTeX/WinEdt do not have everything…
There are a number of translators that are not found in the MiKTeX environment but you can use separately. For example the LaTeX2HTML is a useful tool for creating html documents from .tex files.