Homework Number One - Part One

 

Part One: Getting Familiar with TeX

 

In this course we will be learning how to use the TeX document preparation system, which is the standard way of preparing mathematical documents. In particular you will be required to prepare your homework solutions using this system. In what follows I will assume that you are using an Andrew Unix workstation (or some kind of Linux machine with all the TeX packages installed). You probably want to create a new directory for your TeX experiments, since TeX creates a bunch of files as it runs.
  1. Use your browser to download the sample TeX file sample.tex
  2. Read the file sample.tex and print out a copy. The lines beginning with % signs are comments which explain some of what you see.
  3. At the command line type "latex sample". The latex program will process the file sample.tex and create files sample.aux, sample.log and sample.dvi; it is the DVI file sample.dvi which contains the processed version of the document.
  4. Now type "xdvi sample". You should see a new window containing a preview of the processed document. If you compare it with the text of sample.tex you will probably see roughly how the correspondence between TeX source and processed document works.
  5. Now type "dvips sample". You should obtain a PostScript file called sample.ps, which you can then print out on any PostScript printer.
  6. (Optional) You can translate the TeX file directly into PDF with "pdflatex sample" and then preview the resulting file sample.pdf with "acroread sample.pdf". Try it.
  7. Play around! Try adding some text of your own to the sample file and processing it. Donwload some TeX documents off the web and process them.