Paper resources

The not so short introduction to LaTeX2e

Beginner's manual (71 pages) by Tobias Oetiker, Hubert Partl, Irene Hyna, and Elisabeth Schlegl, available in various formats. For a LaTeX beginner the most convenient version is the pdf version available from Tobias Oetiker's home page. I was able to print this on a Sun workstation, but some people have had trouble with it, so they might try instead to get the dvi file (see below). A PostScript version for European A4 paper is available, but in the United States you may have trouble printing it; however, if your system has the psresize utility from the PSUtils package, then you can reformat the file for U.S. letter paper. You can instead download the dvi file, and run it through dvips to print it.

LaTeX: A Document Preparation System

This is the basic manual by Leslie Lamport, creator of LaTeX. The second edition was published by Addison-Wesley in 1994. It covers LaTeX2e.

Math into LaTeX

By George Grätzer. Published by Birkhäuser in 1996, this book has full coverage of the amsmath package. Tom Scavo has a web page where you can go to get a short course in PDF format and various other materials connected with the book.

The LaTeX Companion

For experienced LaTeX users, this book by Michel Goossens, Frank Mittelbach, and Alexander Samarin, published in 1994 by Addison-Wesley, is essential reading if you want to go beyond the basics and customize, use add-on packages, and so forth. There is also, The LaTeX Graphics Companion, by Michel Goossens, Sebastian Rahtz, and Frank Mittelbach, which was published by Addison-Wesley in 1997.

The TeXbook

By Donald E. Knuth, creator of TeX, the program that underlies LaTeX, this is the bible of the TeX world.