[texhax] LaTeX Student

Alan Litchfield alan at alphabyte.co.nz
Sat Aug 30 04:44:12 CEST 2008


Hi Kazuo,

Seems you need to take a step back to the beginning, rather than  
trying to start in the middle.

Have a look at these tutorials http://www.andy-roberts.net/misc/ 
latex/. They may help in understanding the relationship between LaTeX  
and the various editors that exist.
Otherwise the Not So Short Intro here, http://tug.ctan.org/tex-archive/info/lshort/ 
, is deemed to be a good introduction for those that prefer to do  
stuff offline. Otherwise, buy George Gratzer's new More Math Into  
LaTeX book, which is targetted at people in your position (I see it is  
available from Amazon and that there is Kindle version of it, pretty  
cool).

Cheers
Alan

On 29/08/2008, at 7:50 PM, Kazuo Yamazaki wrote:

> Dear TUG:
>
> My name is Kazuo Yamazaki. I am a math student at Stanford  
> University. I am a typical math student type who has dove into more  
> theoretical side of studies and spent most of my days on blackboard  
> rather than on computer. Consequently, I have had much trouble  
> understanding how to use LaTeX. I really want to understand how to  
> use this program; I have recently written a research paper with a  
> professor and he prefers that I write the draft using LaTeX. I have  
> already tried for a few days to understand how to use it and already  
> ran into troubles. I wonder if I could e-mail you questions  
> periodically and obtain help from you with promise to reply to my  
> questions in a day, or as soon as possible, with enough detail for a  
> beginner like myself to be able to understand. If such request  
> requires that I become a member of TUG, please feel free to inform  
> me as I will be more than happy to.
>
> Below I typed the questions that I already have so you get an idea  
> of what kind of questions to expect from me:
>
> I went to the CTAN main webpage listed below:
>
> http://www.latex-project.org/ftp.html
>
> and downloaded the proTeXt. The web page explained that it has "full  
> TeX system, including LaTeX." But where is LaTeX? After the download  
> was complete, I opened the folder and found the following folders  
> inside:
>
> addons, combobox-2.3, doc, gsv, Install, MiKTeX, Sources,  
> TeXnicCenter, unsupported
>
> I understand that MiKTeX and TeXnicCenter are important features but  
> they are different from LaTeX, aren't they? Assuming MiKTeX and  
> TeXnicCenter are not LaTeX, only thing I could guess after hours of  
> banging my head was that inside the folder "unsupported," there was  
> "texmakerwin32_install" which I downloaded and obtained bunch of  
> pictures and documents and one feature entitled "texmaker." Is that  
> the LaTeX? But if it is LaTex, why, when I click on a button LATEX  
> or PDFLAT, it says "Can't detect the file name"? What does that even  
> mean?
>
> I have a similar problem with TeXnicCenter. Why, when I try to view  
> output via F5, does it say "Cannot execute the command"?
>
> If you could help me, I would really really appreciate it.  
> Otherwise, please advise me to somewhere else where I could get help.
>
> I look forward to hearing from you.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Kazuo Yamazaki
> 1339 Cuernavaca Circulo
> Mountain View, CA 94040
> Cell: (347) 489-0059
>
>
>
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--
Alan Litchfield MBus(Hons), MNZCS
AlphaByte
PO Box 1941, Auckland, NZ. 1140
http://www.alphabyte.co.nz





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