I generally use
vim for editing tex, but I prefer
Kile to for larger documents that are made up of many tex files. Kile can best be described as a Latex IDE. Another really useful program is
KBibTeX, which is a bibtex editor for KDE which works
really well. I'll be posting info in the form of blogs from time to time. The links to latex related blog posts will be posted below:
Some useful packages
The following is a list of useful packages that I've come across while working with latex. I'll eventually provide some examples via my blog as much for myself as for anyone reading this.
- natbib: using the "[numbers,sort]" options will numerically sort your references so that you get [1,4,8] instead of [8,1,4] in your document.
- breakurl: breaks urls in bibliographies properly.
- bera: provides the 'Bitstream Vera' fonts.
- beamer: makes nice presentations.
- booktabs: make nice tables.
- jurabib: has comprehensive facilities for the manipulation of citations.
- FIXme: This package provides you with a way of inserting fixme notes in your documents.
- csvtools: The csvtools package allows you to repeatedly perform a set of LaTeX commands on data in each row of a comma separated variable (CSV) file.
Some Useful Helper Programs
It is hard to keep track of all the useful programs/packages that one can use with Latex. Here's a
thread on Google Groups that lists several useful packages. Here are a list of the most useful ones:
- Rubber: A LaTeX wrapper for automatically building documents.
- Kbibtex: BibTeX editor for KDE.
- BibConverter: BibConverter is a simple web application for direct conversion of data from online bibliographic databases to the BibTeX format.
Using Latex for IEEE Submissions
For submitting latex documents to IEEE conferences, you need to use the IEEE styles which have been updated as of January 2007 the last time I checked. The two files you need are IEEEtran.cls and IEEEtran.bst which is the bibtex style file. I've attached the files to this page for convenience.
Making Slides With Latex-Beamer
If you want to make some really nice looking slides you should have a look at the 'Beamer' package. It will automatically create navigation links and a navigable structure in your PDF output (I'm referring to the 'contents' pane in your PDF reader). Furthermore, Beamer will let you output different formats like 'handouts' or 'slides' etc. Once you get used to it, you should be able to churn out slides faster than using PowerPoint.
Latex on Windows
For those of you wanting to use Latex on Windows, you can install Tex Live or
MikTeX, which are TeX distributions available for windows. In order to edit your tex files, there are several freely available latex editors available:
- Texmaker is a cross-platform latex ide which uses the Qt widget toolkit.
- TeXniCenter is a windows-only latex ide.