[wplug] OT again: LaTeX primers

[John Harrold]

Sometime in August Patrick Wagstrom assaulted the keyboard and produced:

| PS.  One thing I'm surprised that many people miss is pdflatex.  In most
| cases just substitute pdflatex for latex on the command line and you'll
| get a nice looking PDF, instead of having to go through dvi->ps->pdf and
| then seeing it create horrible looking fonts in Acrobat reader.

The main problem I have with pdflatex is that it doesn't support postscript
graphics. This includes pstricks, like another poster mentioned, and it
also includeds eps graphics files.  Of course, eps files can be converted
to pdf files using epstopdf. But if going from dvi->ps->pdf is a pain then
converting 30+ eps files, which can change, to pdf's is also a pain ;).
This is why I started using makefiles to compile my tex documents. 

The dissertation class stuff for LaTeX that pitt provides is really nice.
However, it pretty much requires that you use pdflatex so that the hyperref
package works correctly. Makefiles and a perl script to convert my eps
files to pdf files made things a lot easier. However I had to quit using
pstricks, and I never could get pdftricks to work correctly.

Other things that I find really useful are laprint[1] and figtex2eps[2].
laprint is an m file for matlab that renders all the textual elements in a
figure in LaTeX (using psfrag) and creates an eps file. The figtex2eps
program will render "special" text elements in XFig figures in LaTeX. Why
would I want to do this? This way I get font consistency between my figures
and my document text and it allows me to do some pretty neat things with
figures like [3,4].

[1] http://www.uni-kassel.de/fb16/rat/matlab/laprint/
[2] http://www.math.ntnu.no/~berland/figtex2eps/
[3] http://sage.che.pitt.edu/~harrold/tmp/laprintexample.eps
[4] http://sage.che.pitt.edu/~harrold/tmp/laprintexample.pdf



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