Creating a New Article
Tex is a computer program that can typeset text and mathematical formulae. Latex is a markup language that uses tex as its typesetting engine. Basically this allows the user to embed commands within a text file that can be interpreted by latex to produce a high quality typeset documents. WinEdt is a latex integrated development environment (IDE) for windows, that means that you can both edit text files and produce typeset documents all in one program, it is available to download for free but only on a trial basis. For a free (and in my opinion better) IDE I recommend TeXStudio which is available on all platforms (including Mac and Linux). The program should be available in the clusters but after a recent install it has stopped working.
In this short article I will outline how to open up your first LATEXfile and produce a pdf output. First select ”WinEdt” from the start menu by searching for the item.
Once you have clicked on the program you will be presented with an empty window. You now want to open a new document (NOT a new file), see below
After clicking on a new document you will be presented with a variety of different templates that can be used to create a new document. In this example we want to try the ”LaTeX:AMS Article”, since it comes with Maths and graphics packages preloaded.
After opening up your new document you will see a template document with stars (i.e. *) in the places where you should enter informations. Most of the commands are self explanatory, so put your title in square and curly brackets following \title, the author in the curly brackets following \author and so on. You can try filling in your own information or copy mine...
IMPORTANT:- Until you have saved your document it will not appear on the system and you will not be able to view the output. Click on the save button and you will be presented with the save dialog. You MUST save the file with the correct file ending, this means that you have to put “.tex” on the end of the filename, for instance I
use
use
myNewArticle.tex
in the picture below.
Once your file has been successfully saved you are ready to create a new pdf document by compiling your tex file. WinEdt has a button
that does this it has a little lightning strike in it! Once you have pressed the button a new document should appear on screen.
