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This is a short worked example on how to write and build a LaTeX document. Note that this is not a primer on the language! You should get hold of the Not so short Introduction to Latex for a more complete introduction.

Writing your .tex file

Because this is just a trivial example on how to use LaTeX, not on how to actually write LaTeX documents, my example .tex file won't contain a lot. LaTeX can do plenty more than I'm demonstrating below -- make sure you read the better references mentioned above.

Edit a file called example.tex, and put the following text in it
\documentclass[12pt,a4paper]{report}
\pagenumbering{roman}


\title{Latex Example}
\author{Daniel Lawson}
\date{\today}

\begin{document}


\maketitle

\begin{abstract}

\end{abstract}

\tableofcontents

\newpage

\section{Introduction}

This is a quick introduction to using Latex.

\subsection{Example}

Here is a subsection.

\section{Conclusion}

In conclusion, this example doesn't show a lot. Go read the Not So Short Introduction to \LaTeX for more information.

\end{document}

Building it

Seeing as we're not doing anything complicated with LaTeX, we only need to parse the file once. If you were doing more complicated things, such as including a bibliography, you'd need to run a few more programs. See LatexMakefiles on more tips for that.

Run latex example.tex in the directory you saved your example.tex in earlier.

$ latex example.tex
This is TeX, Version 3.14159 (Web2C 7.3.7)
(./example.tex
LaTeX2e <2001/06/01>
Babel <v3.7h> and hyphenation patterns for american, french, german, ngerman, n
ohyphenation, loaded.
(/usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/base/report.cls
Document Class: report 2001/04/21 v1.4e Standard LaTeX document class
(/usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/base/size12.clo))
No file example.aux.
[1] [1]
No file example.toc.
[1] [2] (./example.aux) )
Output written on example.dvi (4 pages, 1180 bytes).
Transcript written on example.log.

This completed successfully, outputting some extra files created by LaTeX on the way -- the .aux and .toc files are used for internal references. The .dvi file is the first output file.

You can view this with a program called xdvi:

xdvi example.dvi

Making it useful

DVI is a Device Independent format, which in theory makes it really useful. However, it tends to be harder to view in Certain OperatingSystems. Instead, you should convert your .dvi to a PostScript or PDF file:

$ dvips example.dvi -o example.ps
This is dvips(k) 5.86e Copyright 2001 Radical Eye Software (www.radicaleye.com)
' TeX output 2004.12.16:1220' -> example.ps
$ dvipdf example.dvi example.pdf
$ ls *ps *pdf
example.pdf  example.ps
<texc.pro>. [1] [1] [1] [2]

You can now view these with a PostScript or PDF viewer, such as GhostView or AcrobatReader.