## LaTex…it Just Looks Good

September 4, 2009

Well for those of you that don’t know what LaTex is-and I’m not talking about the “fabric”-I suggest you head over to Google and find out.

I’m not all too sure on how to install Tex from the command line, but if I had to guess I would say it is something like sudo apt-get install texlive.  TexLive is the package that gives you LaTex functionality.   I installed this a while back by System>Administration>Synaptic Package Manager then chose to install TexLive from the menu.

Now that you have all that you need (well enough to get started) just open up Gedit or some other text editor.  Let us call this file FIRST.tex and enter the following and save:

 \documentclass{article} \begin{document}
Hey check this out
$$\int_0^\infty\left(\frac{\sin x}{x}\right)^2dx=\frac{\pi}{2}$$ \end{document} 

Now to view your creation you just need to “compile” it to a PDF (or a dvi if you would rather do that).  This is done with the command pdflatex FIRST.tex then to view it you just open up a PDF viewer.  If you are using Adobe this can be accomplished with acroread FIRST.pdf .

Your file should look something like:

Hey check this out $\displaystyle\int_0^\infty\left(\frac{\sin x}{x}\right)^2dx=\frac{\pi}{2}$

Best of luck ‘Tex-ing’.