This Blog is Being Moved

If you have tried to dowload the resource files mentioned on this Blog, they do not work anymore. Reason is I am moving this content to my domain on foursenses.net.

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Ressources for the Beginner

Working with LaTeX may be a bit bewildering at first. It just does not look like you regular word processor at all. Fortunately there are plenty of ressources available in print and on the Internet. The other side of the coin though is that the amount of ressources may be overwhelming, not counting the fact that some of them have been floating around for a while on the Net and may be out of date. This leads to a rule of thumb:

Always check the date of the material your are reading.

Here are some useful (in my experience at least) ressources.

Documents for the Beginner

If you use unicode with LaTeX or XeTeX you can skip everything related to entering accented or special characters in these documents. Using unicode you can now simply enter these characters in your tex document.

• The first document which you should look at is the Not So Short Guide to LaTex. This is probably the standard introduction to LaTeX and is available in many languages. Take time to go through it. It should not take more than two hours, especially since you can skip the section on mathematics (unless that is your field) and much material that goes back to pre unicode in LaTeX. Basically you can read 1.5 but with a text editor you won’t do that; in 2.4 it is better to insert the unicode characters; in 2.5 skim this. Babel is not adviced in XeTeX, use Polyglossia instead; 3 it is only for maths; 4 look at it and come back when necessary, being aware that some packages offer more; 5 math; 6.1 advanced.
• Another very useful document is A Beginner's Introduction to Typesetting With LaTeX. Here too you will be able to skip some information.

From then on you can look for documents related more specifically to your needs. You should also take the habit of looking at the pdf files that come with the packages you use.

Some Books

These are classics but they are not cheap. A good deal of the information they offer can be gathered here and there on the Net but if you can afford them they are very useful and handy.

• The LaTeX Companion - Michel Goossens, Sebastian Rahtz, Frank Mittelbach
• The LaTeX Graphics Companion - Michel Goossens, Sebastian Rahtz, Frank Mittelbach

These and others can be found on, among others, Amazon. See also MacroTeX. Some of these books have been translated.

Some Useful Sites

A few sites that you should know about, on top of those indicated in the right column of this blog. Most of these sites have not integrated using Unicode in LaTeX though.

• The PracTeX Journal. A must, with articles for beginner, intermediate or advanced users.
• Getting to Grips with LaTeX by Andrew Roberts.
• LaTeX Wiki
• Reed College LaTeX Page

LaTeX Non English User Groups

• Dutch User Group: De Nederlandstalige TeX Gebruikersgroep
• French User Group Gutenberg
• German User Group: Dante
• Italian User Group Gruppo Utilizzatori Italiani di TeX
• Spanish User Group: CervanTex (built with Drupal). See also the LaTeX Spanish Wiki

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What is XeTeX? A Basic Template

(This is the reworked version of an earlier post.)
XeTeX was developed by Jonathan Kew at the SIL. As defined on the XeTeX page XeTex is "a typesetting system based on a merger of Donald Knuth's TeX system with Unicode and modern font technologies." Basically XeTeX allows you to use all the fonts on your computer and their variants, for fonts that have any, Unicode and OpenType features without too much trouble. You can see examples of the use of XeTeX at the above XeTeX link and advantages of using XeTeX at The Beauty of LaTeX.
To use XeTeX all you need to do basically is to add the following two lines at the very beginning of your file.

%!TEX TS-program = xelatex
%!TEX encoding = UTF-8 Unicode

The following basic preamble will do the job to begin with. I use the memoir class. This class is very convenient for long documents.

%!TEX TS-program = xelatex
%!TEX encoding = UTF-8 Unicode
\documentclass[10pt]{memoir}
\usepackage{xltxtra,fontspec,xunicode}
\defaultfontfeatures{Scale=MatchLowercase}
\setromanfont[Numbers=Uppercase]{Hoefler Text}
\setmonofont[Scale=0.90,Ligatures=NoCommon]{Courier}

\title{Your Title}
\author{Your Name}
\date{}

\begin{document}

\maketitle
\chapter{Title}

\section{Section Title}
Your text

\subsection{Subsection Title}
Your Text
\end{document}

A couple of comments

• You do not necessarily have to load xunicode and fontspec explicitly, you could simply have \usepackage{xltxtra}. xltxtra loads the other two itself. But I have run into a couple of problems in some texts when not loading everything explicitly. I did not test where the problem was, so I prefer to load all three packages. These three packages take care of using unicode and fonts in XeTeX.
• It is usually advised to load xunicode after fontspec.
• If you have worked in unicode in plain LaTeX with inputenc, do not use it with XeTeX. You do not need it and using it could create conflicts.

Unfortunately at this stage there is no XeTeX manual.There is though a XeTeX manual in progress by Michel Goossens (CERN). Some parts maybe too technical for the average user but it definitely is worth looking at. Have a look at the fontspec.pdf, XeTeX-notes.pdf, and XeTeX-reference.pdf too. These should have come with your LaTeX installation. You can also find them on CTAN.

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