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 there own papers from time to time. For example, you could download the source for my papers from my 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.
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:
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.
