A workshop on T_EX and L^AT_EX

Day 1: Plain T_EX

• What T_EX is for
  • Traditional typesetting in mathematics
  • Early automation
  • The development of T_EX
  • The design of T_EX
• Stages of T_EX{}ing: editing, typesetting, display, printing
  • Editing with XEmacs: starting, opening a file, saving, closing
  • Typesetting with T_EX
  • Display with xdvi
  • Printing with a2ps
• Plain text without markup: default formatting
• Interacting with T_EX
  • T_EX's progress reports
  • T_EX's advisories: warnings and error reports
  • Overfull and underfull boxes: causes and cures
  • Signalling the end of a document: the bye command
• Punctuation and special characters in T_EX
  • Quotation marks
  • Hyphens, dashes, and minus signs
  • Ampersands and dollar signs
  • Ties
• Comments in .tex files
  • Percentage signs
• Control words and groups
  • Accents
  • The noindent command
  • The leftline, centerline, and rightline commands
  • Groups: limiting the effects of a command
  • Groups: defining the boundaries of the object of a command
  • Rules: The hrule command
  • Empty groups
• Selecting fonts
• Margins, headers, and footers
  • Changing the text size: the hoffset, voffset, hsize, and vsize commands
  • The nopagenumbers command
  • The headline and footline commands
  • Filling; the hfil and vfil commands
  • Skips: smallskip, medskip, and bigskip
  • Line breaks: hfillbreak
  • Page breaks: vfilleject, goodbreak
• Math mode and display math mode
  • Single and double dollar signs
  • Italics in math mode
  • Non-italic names of special functions
  • Restoring text mode inside math mode
  • Details of spacing
  • Micromanaging the spacing
  • Absolute values and \texttt{|}
  • Delimiters; the left and right commands
  • The calligraphic font
• Subscripts and superscripts
• Fractions; grouping with the over command
• Aligned equations
  • The eqno command
  • The eqalign command
• Extensions of T_EX
• Exercise set #1
• Solutions: exercise 2, exercise 3, exercise 4, exercise 5, exercise 6.

Day 2: L^AT_EX and mathematics

• L^AT_EX as an extension of T_EX
  • High-level macros
  • Logical vs.~visual formatting
• The structure of a L^AT_EX document
  • The preamble
  • The documentclass command
  • Required and optional arguments
  • The title, author, and date commands
  • Beginning and ending environments
  • The document environment
  • Sectioning
  • Displays in L^AT_EX
• Declarations
  • Font declarations
• Environments
  • The quotation environment
  • The verse environment
  • The itemize, enumerate, and description environments
  • The verbatim environment
  • The displaymath environment
  • Text inside math under L^AT_EX
• Mathematical symbols and structures
  • Fractions; the frac command
• Arrays and matrices
  • The array environment
  • The equation, eqnarray, and eqnarray* environments
  • Rules and struts
• Theorems: the theorem environment
• Tables
  • The tabular environment
  • Column dividers; alignment
  • Row dividers
  • Partial row dividers
  • The multicolumn command
• Exercise set #2
• Solutions: exercise 1, exercise 2, exercise 3, exercise 4, exercise 5, exercise 6, exercise 7, exercise 8.

Day 3: Defining commands and environments in L^AT_EX

• Defining commands
• Commands with parameters
• Defining environments
• Including files (input)
  • Assembling books from articles or chapters
  • Including separately written sections
  • Including definitions
• L^AT_EX packages (usepackage)
  • The amsmath package
    • Multiple integrals (iint, etc.)
    • Boxed formulas (boxed)
    • Text in math context (text)
    • Matrix environments (pmatrix, bmatrix, vmatrix, etc.)
    • The align environment
    • The intertext command
  • The amssymb package
    • The nmid command
  • The graphics package
    • Including a graphics file (includegraphics)
    • Resizing a box (scalebox and resizebox)
    • Rotations and reflections (rotatebox and reflectbox)
• Exercise set #3
• Solutions: exercise 1, exercise 2, exercise 3, exercise 4, exercise 5, exercise 6.

This document is available on the World Wide Web as

http://www.cs.grinnell.edu/~stone/events/tex-workshop/

created June 12, 2002
last revised December 15, 2003

John David Stone (stone@cs.grinnell.edu)