Two main things to install

As briefly introduced, LaTeX is a computer program that allows you to produce scientific documents that feature professional levels of typesetting. LaTeX is especially ideal for producing documents with many mathematical equations and expressions (e.g., sub-, super-indices, Greek symbols, geometric symbols, other weird symbols, mathematical relationships of functions, even including figures, etc.).

See what kind of mathematical symbols and expressions are available in LaTeX:

It is supported in cross operating systems, including Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux/Unix. The installation is all available for different systems, meaning that you simply need to install proper software packages on your machine and enjoy using it!

Don’t worry if you are a workaholic and you never go home but stay sleepless nights at your office, you can install it easily on your workstation no matter what different OS the machine runs on.

Most likely, a public server, such as the Grape Linux cluster in our department, is available for you with LaTeX already installed by system admin folks. So in this case there is nothing you have to do but start using it.

On Linux, a quick way to check to see if LaTeX is already installed is to run the following Linux commands after the Linux prompt $:

$ which latex
$ which pdflatex

It is installed correctly for you if you see something like:

/usr/texbin/latex

Otherwise, your first big task is to install one on your machine. Take a deep breath. This is going to be your first mini-project to install scientific libraries for yourself if it hasn’t been not done!

There are two main software components to download and install. They are in general,

  1. LaTeX editor, and
  2. LaTeX package.

Note

In addition to the above two, Windows users would also need to install Ghostscript and Ghostview in order to view and convert PostScript and PDF.

What and how to install become different depending on what OS your machine runs on. Let’s take a look at them next.