[EXT] how to start tex program to write first program

[John C Frain]

0I presume that you are working on MS Windows.  In my experience, many
Windows experience problems such as those that you have encountered when
they start to use LaTeX.  The template that you have obtained can produce
some very nice output.  When you expand your zip (preserve directories if
offered this option) you will find a file thesis.pdf.  Print (or view) this
with a pdf viewer to get a view of what the "template" can produce.

A first step in learning to use Latex would be to try to reproduce this pdf
yourself. Someone in your College or in your IT Department has set up a
very nice template to produce papers etc. using LaTeX.  Your first call
might be to see if you can contact one of those persons.  Surely someone
else (student or staff) in your Department has used the template and could
provide you with some assistance in this task.  I have started many
economists by providing them with a template and showing them how to
proceed.  It should be possible to accomplish this is 15 - 30 minutes.  I
have a set of notes that I distribute on such occasions. These can be
downloaded from https://ideas.repec.org/e/pfr62.html .   I recommend
TexStudio (https://www.texstudio.org/) as an editor for and interface to
Latex.  I think that Windows users would be more comfortable with Texstudio
than with other such programs. If you accept the defaults when installing
tex and texstudio then there is no need to configure it at this stage.  You
may ar a later stage need to configure your language (dictionary for spell
check) but you can put this off till later.  The default compiler is
pdflatex which produces a pdf file directly from your tex file

The file thesis.tex is the main file that you will start editing.  It is
well worth examining. Any line that starts with an # is a comment and will
be ignored by the pdflatex compiler.  The first part of the program - that
between the document class statement and the \begin{document) statement
contains the late options that are passed to the pdflatex program.  The
part between the \begin{doument) and the \end{document} statement contains
the text, equations, tables, graphs, etc in the document.

In the document, you will see instructions such as

\input{texfiles/Chapter1}

When thesis.tex is processed by pdflatex the contents of "Chapter1.tex" in
the subdirectory "texfiles" of the working directory are read as if they
were in thesis.tex at that point.  It is good practice to include the
chapters in separate files.

Now delete thesis.pdf, open texstudio, load thesis.tex, Under options set
thesis.tex as root document.  There is a double triangle on its side (Build
and view F5).  Click on this tool and you should recreate the pdf file.

(I have compiled thesis.tex on Linux on this Laptop.  Linux is case
sensitive and there are case mismatches between thesis.tex and the files in
the template.  this would incline me to think that the template was
designed on Windows.  This should make it easier for you to obtain help
locally

Best of Luck.  If you persevere you will find Latex very useful.

John





John C Frain
3 Aranleigh Park
Rathfarnham
Dublin 14
Ireland
www.tcd.ie/Economics/staff/frainj/home.html
mailto:frainj at tcd.ie
mailto:frainj at gmail.com


On Sat, 7 Mar 2020 at 18:38, political science <tapas.abhitech at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
>
> On Sat, 7 Mar 2020 at 23:18, Philip Taylor <P.Taylor at rhul.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>> political science wrote:
>>
>> I installed tex, approximately 6 gb was downloaded.
>> I read http://ctan.imsc.res.in/info/first-latex-doc/first-latex-doc.pdf
>> what I am not able to understand among the folders  in a directory
>> C:\texlive\2019
>> which icon should I double click so that program starts and I start
>> writing some
>> thing.
>>
>>
>> Below "C:\texlive\2019", you should find "bin\win32", within which you
>> should find "TeXworks.exe".  Launch this (by double-clicking), and a TeX
>> editor will load; you can then type your first TeX program into its main
>> window :
>>
>> Many thanks, I was looking for this information only.
>
> I have been given a template by department
> how can I use the template which has been given to me as zip to be used in
> this kind of scenario.
>
>>
>>
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