TeX and LaTeX Resources

The mathematics department has a special interest in promoting the use of TeX and LaTeX for writing pretty much anything —papers, theses, homework, even posters!

We have a Tips & Tricks document (PDF; 616 KB) that gives you some hints about the trickier aspects of using TeX and LaTeX on the department's systems.

Online Resources

Our TeX online resources page has links to useful TeX and LaTeX support materials on the web.

HMC Classes

We have a number of locally developed LaTeX classes for use in formatting documents. These classes are installed in /shared/local/texlive/texmf-local on the department's Linux systems, and can also be downloaded for use on your own machine.

These classes include:

Packages

The department also has a number of LaTeX packages or style files that we have developed. Packages that are not available from CTAN may be available for download from our LaTeX package section. (The “home pages” for such packages are also located in this section.)

Sample Documents

The hmcposter class includes a sample document. For Clinic and thesis reports, you can download and TeX our sample report, which can be built against either class and produce both a sample Clinic report and a sample thesis.

Bibliography Styles

We have several bibliography styles available for use with these classes or on your own projects.

TeX Systems

To use TeX or LaTeX, you need a “TeX system”. If you're using a department machine, there's probably already some TeX system installed, but for your own machine you'll need to buy or download a TeX system and install it. There are some commercial systems, but most people (including us!) use the free ones, so that's what we'll talk about here.

For Linux

Most Linux distributions have TeX available in prebuilt packages, so all you have to do is figure out which packages are available on your system and run the appropriate package-management tool to install them.

TeX-Live is the current best choice, but some older systems may only have teTeX (which was the previous best choice) available. Both are good.

For Debian or Ubuntu, apt-get install tetex (on older systems); or apt-get install texlive (on newer systems).

For Red Hat Enterprise Linux, up2date --install teTeX; for CentOS or Fedora, yum -y install tetex.

For Windows

TUG has a package called proTeXt. We have a local mirror of the (very large—~550 MB) package.

ProTeX includes MikTeX, some editor/front-end programs (including TeXnicCenter (free) and WinEDT (shareware)) to make using TeX easier, and some other tools, all in one package.

For Mac OS X

MacTeX is what you want. MacTeX includes a TeX-Live–based TeX system, various front-end programs, including TeXShop, and a bunch of other useful tools for editing BibTeX databases, typesetting small pieces of LaTeX code (for including in other types of documents), and so on.

As with proTeXt, we have a local mirror of this very large (~750 MB) package.

Note that the MacTeXtras disk image has some additional tools, documentation, and demonstrations that are not included in the MacTeX disk image.