IntroductionHello World!New ParagraphsA Word on ErrorsScientific Papers in LaTeXThe Title PageThe AbstractSection HeadersTypesetting MathematicsAMS MathIncluding GraphicsPresentationsThe BibliographyGetting and Installing a TeX SystemWindows InstallationMacintosh InstallationEmacs + AuCTeXSupport and Reference MaterialsIntroductionHello World!Scientific Papers in LaTeXGetting and Installing a . . .Support and Reference . . .Home PageTitle PageJJ IIJ IPage 1 of 21Go BackFull ScreenCloseQuitWriting Scientific PapersinLATEXDavid ArnoldSeptember 21, 2001(revised December 31, 2008)IntroductionHello World!Scientific Papers in LaTeXGetting and Installing a . . .Support and Reference . . .Home PageTitle PageJJ IIJ IPage 1 of 21Go BackFull ScreenCloseQuit1. IntroductionWe assume that our readers1have a working TEX system on their computers. If this is not thecase, see Section 4, Getting and Installing a TeX System.There are a number of editors that work well with TEX, but Microsoft Word is not one ofthem (unless you save the Word files as pure text). These editors range in complexity, fromthe simple Notepad program that comes with all Windows systems, to GNU Emacs, a powerfultext editor, perhaps the favorite of the math and science community. However, we will use ashareware program called TeXworks in all of our demonstrations in these pages. There are tworeasons for this choice:1. TeXworks is installed on all of our systems at College of the Redwoods..2. TeXworks comes preinstalled with MiKTeX.This article does not pretend to be a complete introduction to LATEX. There are plenty oftutorials written on the internet that already give complete descriptions of the LATEX language(see Section 5, entitled Support and Reference Materials, for a number of books and tutorialson LATEX and TEX). Rather, we have a simple goal: get you up to speed on using LATEX to typethe project paper due at the end of the term.With that goal in mind, we begin by writing a simple “Hello, World!” document, just to getyou up and running. We then show how to set the title page and abstract and spend some timediscussing section headers. We will spend quite some time discussing mathematics, but again,this is by no means a complete discussion. See the reference texts in Support and ReferenceMaterials for further assistance in typesetting mathematics. Also, you might want to investigatethe American Mathematical Society’s User’s Guide. Any good scientific writer will eventually1Note that this document is fully hyperlinked. Some links are obvious (see the control panel at the right),but there are others that may not immediately be apparent. In general, colored text in the narrative has a highprobability of being a link. One color is used for links within the document, another color for URL’s and linksto documents outside this document. Passing your mouse over a link will reveal the nature of the link. Clickthese links for more information, then use the “Back” button in the panel at the right to return to your previousposition in this document and continue reading.IntroductionHello World!Scientific Papers in LaTeXGetting and Installing a . . .Support and Reference . . .Home PageTitle PageJJ IIJ IPage 2 of 21Go BackFull ScreenCloseQuitneed to reference sections, equations, figures, etc., so we spend a bit of time on referencing, thenwe complete our discussion with a word about bibliographies. These are the main ingredientsof any well written scientific article.Let’s begin.2. Hello World!Every programming class opens with a “Hello, World!” program, whether it be C++ or Fortanor Lisp. The idea is to write and compile an extremely simple program, just to get you started.We will follow that lead here. Open TeXworks, create a new document, then enter the followingsource code.\documentclass{article}\begin{document}Hello, World!\end{document}Save the document as intro.tex.2After saving your file, select pdfLaTex from the Typesetmenu, then select Typeset from the Typeset menu. Note that there are options for this as wellon the toolbar, a drop down menu where you can select pdfLaTex (if it is not selected already)and a green button to the left of the drop down menu that you can click to begin the compilationprocess (there are also shortcut keys for this: Ctrl+T on Windows, Command+T on the Mac).You can then watch a number of responses scroll by in the Console output window at the bottomof the screen as your file is compiled. If there are errors, fix the errors (see Section 2.2, A Wordon Errors), then recompile by clicking the Typeset icond again.2A word about file organization. It is not a good idea to lump all files into one common directory. Goodorganization of directories (folders) is a must. So, for this activity, create a folder called Intro on your hard drive(or in your network folder at school) and save the file intro.tex in this folder. Later, when you are working onyour final project, create a folder called Project and place all files associated with your project in your Projectfolder.IntroductionHello World!Scientific Papers in LaTeXGetting and Installing a . . .Support and Reference . . .Home PageTitle PageJJ IIJ IPage 3 of 21Go BackFull ScreenCloseQuitOnce you’ve successfully compiled intro.tex, a file named intro.pdf will open in a secondwindow. This is the compiled version of your code, the final document that you will print andhand in for credit.2.1. New ParagraphsYou start a new paragraph by entering a blank line in your source code (two consecutive strikingsof the Enter key). At this point, it would be a good exercise to just do some normal typing toget the feel of how easy LATEX can be. So, type in a few paragraphs, separating each with ablank line in the source, then recompile and view the resulting pdf file.2.2. A Word on ErrorsAs you enter your source code in TeXworks, you will constantly make errors. Sometimes youwill catch these errors as you type, but more often than you would like to see, errors will showup when you compile your document. For example, edit the first line of intro.tex so that thefile reads as follows.\documentclass{article\begin{document}Hello, World!\end{document}Note that we left off the closing brace after the word ‘article.’ Click the Typeset icon to compilethe file. On our system, the log window reports the following error.Runaway argument? {article \begin {document} Hello, World! \end{document} ! File ended while scanning use of \@[email protected] text