Official LaTeX project website difficult

[Nusc]

I don't understand why the official LaTeX project website has to make things unnecessarily difficult.

http://www.latex-project.org/ftp.html

All I would like to do is download the required programs to install LaTeX. But instead they write all this garbage.

Is there anyone out there willing to help me install this program?


Thanks

 

[robphy]

I don't understand why the official LaTeX project website has to make things unnecessarily difficult.

http://www.latex-project.org/ftp.html

All I would like to do is download the required programs to install LaTeX. But instead they write all this garbage.

Is there anyone out there willing to help me install this program?


Thanks

LaTeX is essentially a macro package for TeX.
As advertised, http://www.latex-project.org/ftp.html says

First, a word of warning: This site is not the download source for the LaTeX software. It's the project site. This page tells you about several ways of getting LaTeX to your computer, but each of them involves downloading the software from somewhere else.

What you probably want are the implementations in a TeX distribution, as listed midway down that page:
http://www.tug.org/texlive/
http://www.tug.org/teTeX/
http://www.rna.nl/tex.html
http://www.fptex.org/
http://www.tug.org/protext/

On Windows, I use http://www.miktex.org/. Start here: http://www.miktex.org/setup.html
Alternatively, you can install tetex as part of http://www.cygwin.com/ , if you prefer to work with X and a unix-like environment under Windows.

 

[Nusc]

I have no idea what you're talking about but I will use miktex.

What is unique about this one?

I am currently updating MiKTeX, what should I do next?

Thanks

 

[robphy]

You can think of it like this.
TeX is the typesetting package.. the main software package.
LaTeX is an optional add-on (a "plugin") that makes some tedious tasks easier.

MikTeX is easy to setup, maintain, and upgrade ... and I'm lazy... I've been using it comfortably for a while (since an early version).

http://math.la.asu.edu/boji/wintex.html (step by step)
When the install is complete, you should be ready to go.

Here are some tutorials to get you started
http://www.miktex.org/manual/localguide.html
http://www-h.eng.cam.ac.uk/help/tpl/textprocessing/

You can also look over the examples of math equations here:
https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=8997
click on the equation to see the underlying LaTeX code in a popup window.

 

[chronon]

I too found the structure of TeX distributions confusing to start with. Part of the problem is that there's no obvious program to run. Its useful to have a tex shell such as that at http://www.projectory.de/texshell/ . This is configured to work with the MikTeX distribution.

 

[robphy]

First, here's the MiKTeX FAQ on this:
http://www.miktex.org/faq/basics.html

A TeX/LaTeX .tex file a plain-text file, which can be composed in any editor [even Notepad!].
Certainly, some editors are nicer than others... and some editors have features that are useful for composing TeX/LaTeX.

The program to run (on the command line) is called "latex":

latex myfile.tex

(If you don't use the LaTeX package, you can use the more primitive "tex" command.) The output of "tex" or "latex" is a .dvi file, which can be viewed with "yap" on MikTeX, which can be started by double-clicking on myfile.dvi .

When ready to distribute to a wide audience, you probably want to run, for example, "dvips" or "dvipdf".

dvips myfile.dvi

The output is a postscript .ps or acrobat .pdf file.

These commands (except for "yap") are standard for practically any properly-configured LaTeX distribution... on any platform.

Some text editors allow these "command line programs" to be invoked from within the editor. TeXShell happens to be one such editor, which also has some useful TeX/LaTeX features (like the symbol buttons and the highlighting). However, I have my own favorite general-purpose editors [which support highlighting and many other features] which I prefer to use.

For a beginner, a properly-configured-for-MikTeX editor, like TeXShell, is certainly useful. A more sophisticated editor is TeXnic, as mentioned in the above URL.

 

[aranyakam]

There is an excellent LaTeX document editor + userfriendly interface to MikTeX called "WinEdt"