Pat Q. Student
AME 20214
15 September 2016
This is a sample file in the text formatter L
A
T
EX. I require you to use it for the following reasons:
•It produces the best output of text, figures, and equations of any program I’ve seen.
•It is machine-independent. It runs on Linux, Macintosh (see TeXShop), and Windows (see MiKTeX and
TeXnicCenter) machines. You can e-mail ASCII versions of most relevant files.
•It is the tool of choice for many research scientists and engineers. Many journals accept L
A
T
EX sub-
missions, and many books are written in L
A
T
E
X.
Some basic instructions are given below. Put your text in here. You can be a little sloppy about spacing. It
adjusts the text to look good. You can make the text smaller. You can make the text tiny. You can link to web sites
Skip a line for a new paragraph. You can use italics (e.g. Computers are everywhere) or bold. Greek
letters are a snap: Ψ, ψ, Φ, φ. Equations within text are easy— A well known equation for a line is
y=mx +b. Here yis the dependent variable, xis the independent variable, mis the slope, and bis the
intercept. You can also set aside equations like so:
d2θ
dt2=−
g
ℓsin θ, Newton’s second law for pendulum motion,(1)
g
ℓsin θ=g
ℓ
∞
X
n=0
(−1)nθ2n+1
(2n+ 1)! =g
ℓθ−
θ3
6+θ5
120 −
θ7
5040 +....(2)
Equation (1) is Newton’s second law for pendulum motion. Here θis the angular position, tis time, g
is gravitational acceleration, and ℓis length. Equation (2) gives a series expansion relevant to Eq. (1).
References1are available. If you have a postscript file, say sample.figure.eps, in the same local directory,
you can insert the file as a figure. Figure 1, below, plots Bessel functions, three times repeated, so as to
demonstrate how to insert multiple plots.
246 8 10
-0.4
0.4
0.8
Jn(x)
x
n=1
n=2 n=3 n=4
Bessel functions
0.0
246 8 10
-0.4
0.4
0.8
Jn(x)
x
n=1
n=2 n=3 n=4
Bessel functions
0.0
246 8 10
-0.4
0.4
0.8
Jn(x)
x
n=1
n=2 n=3 n=4
Bessel functions
0.0
Figure 1: Sample figure plotting Bessel functions, three times repeated.
Running L
A
T
E
X
You can create a L
A
T
E
X file with any text editor (vi,emacs,gedit, etc.). To get a document, you need
to run the L
A
T
EX application on the text file. The text file must have the suffix “.tex”. On a Linux cluster
machine, this is done via the command
latex2pdf file.tex
This generates file.pdf. You should execute this command at least twice to implement numbering correctly.
Alternatively, you can use TeXShop on a Macintosh or MiKTeX/TeXnicCenter on a Windows-based machine.
The .tex file must have a closing statement as below.
1Lamport, L., 1986, L
A
T
E
X: User’s Guide & Reference Manual, Addison-Wesley: Reading, Massachusetts.
1