Homework assignment: LaTeX assignment

The purpose of this assignment is to develop some preliminary facility with LaTeX, particularly with math equations and tables. You are to try to duplicate (approximately) the 2-page paper in latex-assign.pdf

Go over some examples of a basic LaTeX paper in example.tex and the corresponding output example.pdf. You can use "make" to do the repeated calls to latex with the Makefile

I strongly recommend using LaTeX for thesis proposals and theses. There is a style file available (which should be a good starting point at least) in http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~you/notes/ucthesis-ucsc/ There also seems to be a version (possibly more recently tweaked) at https://github.com/adamnovak/ucscthesis

There is a cool tool for guessing the LaTeX code for hand-drawn symbols at http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html Personally, I find it faster to scan a list of symbols (particularly since drawing with a touch pad on a laptop is tough), but others may find this drawing approach useful. The comprehensive list at http://mirrors.ctan.org/info/symbols/comprehensive/symbols-a4.pdf is a useful one.

Cover preparing a document with LaTeX. Go over example.tex, and using a Makefile and gnumake to run LaTeX, BibTeX, dvips, and distill. Explain difference between using pdflatex and distill or ps2pdf. Maybe talk about how to set up ssh to do passphraseless ssh to apache or sundance to run distill.

Setting up your PRINTER environment variable correctly: see instructions at http://support.soe.ucsc.edu/printing

I use the small distribution BasicTex on my Mac, because it is quick to download, takes up little disk space (only 86Mbytes), and has everything I use. Some people prefer a GUI interface like TeXWorks.

A number of students have found it useful to use sharelatex.com to get an on-line editor and viewer for LaTeX that allows multiple users to edit a document. There are other similar services

Turn in both the .tex source and the printed output at the beginning of class.

Main missed points in previous years:

• The main missed point on LaTeX was that several people did not use the \label and \ref commands for creating cross-references.
• The trick for unaligning the first line was rather ugly:

      \begin{eqnarray}
      \hbox to 5pt{$E(c^2) =$ \hskip 0pt minus 1fill} & & \nonumber\\
  	    &=& \lambda^{-2} \int_{-\infty}^{\infty}  {y^2\over(1+e^{y})(1+e^{-y})}   dy \\
  
      

• Trick for getting good-looking conditional probability:

      \newcommand{\prob}{\mbox{Prob}}
      \newcommand{\bfgiven}{\mathchoice{\mathrel{\Bigl|}}{\mathrel{\bigl|}}{\mathrel{\bigl|}}{\mathrel{|}}}
      \newcommand{\condprob}[2]{\prob\left( #1 \bfgiven #2 \right)}
      

• Left quotes with ``
• Using unbreakable space (~) after non-sentence-ending period.
• Using ~. to end sentence in display math
• Distinguishing \Pi from \prod

Practice speaking loudly

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