At the end of my PhD, a thesis writing with Latex is inevitable. However the Latex is not my primary writing tool during the whole process of my PhD. The Microsoft word seems more easy and intuitive when some small pieces of work are required. In this case, I am going to construct the Latex writing environment before any composing are produced. The last time when I used the Latex for writing was three years ago for the first year long report. It was all accomplished in an apple Mac environment with simple installation process and intuitive user interface. As for this time, I will complete all works in Linux environment. Here I will review how to produce a work using Latex in Linux firstly.
Simple work process:
- Composing the latex document.
- Compile the latex document: latex <filename.tex>
- Review the dvi file: xdvi <filename.dvi>
- Produce the pdf file: pdflatex <filename.tex>
The work process mentioned above is just a fairly simple one without other excessive works. It is enough if it is treated as an hello world testing.
In order to use the Latex in Fedora, some packages should be installed at the first place. Here is a collection of install packages which are available in Fedora 17 's yum package installation tool:
- texlive: for latex environment.
- texlive-latex: for latex command for front end program.
- xdvik: for dvi viewer.
This is all the packages that can handle most situations of latex writing. At least those are all needed by the hello work one mentioned.
Using a light-weight text editor to manipulate a latex document is really painful, at least for me. So I found another package available in yum repository:
This is a convenient IDE to edit latex document.
