Chapter 1
Template

1.1 How to co mpile a .tex file to a .pdf file

1.1.1 Tools

:To process the files you (may) need

• pdflatex (for example from tetex package ≥ 0.9-6, which you can get from Red Hat 5.2)

• acroread (a PDF viewer, available from http://www.adobe.com/)

• ghostscript≥5.10 (for example from Red Hat Contrib) and ghostview or gv (from RedHat Linux)

• efax package could be useful, if you plan to fax documents.

1.1.2 How to use the tools

:Follow these steps
1. put all source .tex files in one directory, then chdir to the directory (or put some of them in the L ATEXsearch path — if you know how to do this)

2. run “pdflatex file.tex” on the main file of the document three times
 (three — to prepare valid table of contents)

3. to see or print the result use acroread (unfortunately some versions of acroread may produce PostScript which is too complex), or
 

6 CHAPTER 1. TEMPLATE

4. run ghostscript: “gv file.pdf” to display or: “gs -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pswrite -q -dBATCH -sOutputFile=file.ps file.pdf” to produce a PostScript file

5. run “fax send phone-number file.ps” as root to send a fax, or — if you know how to do this — modify the fax script to be able to fax .pdf files directly (you have to insert “|%PDF*” somewhere...)

1.2 How to write a document

1.2.1 The main document

Choose the name of the document, say document. Copy template. tex to document .tex, then edit it, change the title, the authors and set proper include(s) for all the chapters.

1.2.2 Chapters

Each chapter should be included in the main document as a separate file. You can choose any name for the file, but we suggest adding a suffix to the name of the main file. For our example we use the file name document_chapter1.tex. First, copy template_chapter.tex to document_chapter1.tex and add the line

include{document_chapter1}

in the document.tex, then edit document_chapter1.tex, change the chapter title and edit the body of the chapter appropriately.

1.2.3 Spell-checking

Do use a spell-checker, please! You may also want to check grammar, style and so on. Actually you should do it (if you have enough spare time). But you must check spelling! You can use the ispell package for this, from within emacs, or from the command line:

ispell -t document_chapter1.tex

1.3. L ATEX AND PDFL ATEX CAPABILITIES

1.3 L ATEX and pdfL ATEX capabilities

1.3.1 Overview

First you edit your source .tex file. In L ATEX you compile it using the latex command to a .dvi file (which stands for device-independent). The .dvi file can be converted to any device-dependent format you like using an appropriate driver, for example dvips.

 When producing .pdf files you should use pdflatex, which produces directly .pdf files out of .tex sources. Note that in the .tex file you may need to use some PDF specific packages.

 For viewing .tex files use your favourite text editor, for viewing .dvi files under X Window System use xdvi command, .ps files can be viewed with gv (or ghostview) and .pdf files with acroread, gv or xpd.