LaTeX basics

Learning LaTeX

One very good idea is to get a LaTeX file from a more experienced user so that you can see their tricks in action, and just cut and paste. Even experienced LaTeX users do this from their own papers from time to time. For example, you could download the source for Ben Webster's papers from his website. More generally, you can get the source of any paper on the arXiv, which should lead to a fairly inexhaustable source of LaTeX tricks beyond the standard tutorials.

If you want to use the exam package, you could use this practice final.

Useful References

"The Not-so-short introduction to LaTeX2e" is very complete, and also written in a very easy to understand fashion. It's probably more useful as a reference than anything else -- I don't recommend reading it cover-to-cover.

"Using the exam document class" is a very readable introduction to a very useful document class.

Installing LaTeX

Main article here.

Editors

Learn to use a specialized LaTeX editor. For the department computers, probably the best choice is Emacs with AucTeX.

Here are some very useful reference cards for Emacs and AucTeX commands.

To use AucTeX (and RefTeX), edit your .emacs file (you may not know it's there, but it is), for example with the shell command

emacs ~/.emacs &

and insert the lines

(require 'tex-site) 
(setq reftex-plug-into-AUCTeX t)
(add-hook 'LaTeX-mode-hook 'turn-on-reftex)

After this, AucTeX will automatically start up any time you use a TeX document.

For your home computer, you may need to download these packages. On a Mac, this can be done with Fink.

Other editor options include:

• WinEdt for Windows,
• Kile for KDE,
• TexShop for Mac OS.

Diagrams

Th most popular package for drawing diagrams is XYpic. Drawing roughly rectalinear commutative diagrams is relatively easy (see the xyguide), but in fact, there is a lot more you can do with this package if you're willing to go through the steeper learning curve and learn xypic proper. Aaron Lauda has a lot of useful examples in his tutorial.

Bibliographies

Learn how to use BibTeX. I promise you won't regret it later. Remember that you can get BibTeX citations from from MathSciNet or the Front. Somewhat obnoxiously, the standard BibTeX styles won't produce a citation to the arXiv, so you'll want an special BibTeX style. I use halpha.bst.

If ever want access to the LaTeX version of the bibliography that BibTeX has created, it's in the file *.bbl. If you submit a paper with BibTeX'ed bibliography to the arXiv, you should include the *.bbl file, NOT the *.bib.