LaTeX Configuration
LaTeX! I could wax philosophical about its usefulness and superiority as a typesetting tool (especially for technical documents) for hours — especially about the advantage of using vectorized fonts and figures, style files, references, labels, and so on. But, seeing as the subject has been covered far more eloquently by others in websites such as The beauty of LaTeX and Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient :), I'll leave that to people who have more time on their hands than I do. For those of you unfamiliar with the program, see the LaTeX home page as well as the TeX users group.
In case you haven't heard, Linux originated from a geeky Finnish programmer back in the early 90's, and thus the default configuration for LaTeX in many Linux distributions is based upon a European setup (A4 paper, etc.). Back when I was a budding Linux enthusiast, I found the LaTeX configuration files and edited them by hand when installing Linux on a new computer (which was kind of a pain), until I stumbled upon texconfig late one night in my old apartment in Boulder, Colorado. texconfig can't slice and dice and all that other stuff since it's a bit...shall we say...unpolished, but it gets the job done. The interactive mode to texconfig works best with a real vt100 terminal or inside an xterm window with at least 24 rows and 80 columns (it's kind of particular). Since the default terminal these days is gnome-terminal, let's launch an xterm before running texconfig:
~>
xterm &
Scroll over to the new xterm window
that just popped up, and make sure that the bash realizes
that it actually is using "xterm"
and not a "linux"
terminal:
~>
export TERM=xterm
Next, verify that the TERM variable
was set correctly:
~>
echo $TERM
You should see an immediate return of "xterm". With the terminal
variable set correctly, launch texconfig
using sudo:
~>
sudo texconfig
You should see a message about how the "interactive texconfig
utility will be started now." Hit Enter to
continue.Scroll down to the PAPER option, and hit Enter. Then scroll down and select the LETTER option to set the default paper to a standard U.S. size. Once set, hit Enter to continue.
We need to do the same thing for dvips, which converts the generated device independent file (.dvi) into postscript after latex'ing it. So scroll down to DVIPS and hit Enter. Select the DEST option, hit Enter, and hit Enter again (and again). This will disable dvips from immediately printing to the printer (which is pretty annoying), and will force it to print to a postscript file by default. Then select the PAPER option and choose letterSize paper. Hit Enter to continue, RETURN back to the main menu, and EXIT. Close out the xterm, and we're done!
TeTeX Extras
The Fedora repository offers a number of add-on programs to TeTeX/LaTeX, some of which are very useful as document creation utilities. Without getting into specifics, I'm just going to list them out here, although tetex-xdvi is extremely important as it allows you to take a look at .xdvi files. If you wish to install all of them use yum to do so:
~>
sudo yum install bib2html BibTool tetex-IEEEtran tetex-bytefield tetex-dvipost
tetex-elsevier tetex-eurofont tetex-font-cm-lgc
tetex-font-kerkis tetex-fonts-hebrew tetex-perltex tetex-prosper
tetex-tex4ht tetex-unicode texlive-afm texlive-context texlive-doc
texlive-dviutils texlive-east-asian texlive-texmf-afm
texlive-texmf-context texlive-texmf-doc texlive-texmf-east-asian
texlive-texmf-xetex texlive-xetex xdvik xdvipdfmx texi2html texmaker TeXmacs
Press 'y' when
prompted to install the programs and any additional dependencies. LaTeX Path
I have a local ~/lib/tex and ~/lib/bibtex directory to store localized LaTeX style files. To include the directories in your path, including the /usr/share/texmf base directory, edit your ~/.bashrc file and add the following:
export
TEXINPUTS=/usr/share/texmf:~/lib/tex:~/lib/bibtex:
Save and exit. Finally, source
your ~/.bashrc
file: ~>
source ~/.bashrc
You are now ready to launch
any of the above programs.