| Category
| Links
| Notes
|
| PDF
& Postscript
| Adobe Reader
Windows/Linxu/Mac
| The standard PDF viewer.
|
|
| CutePDF Writer
Windows
| Write PDF ’s without buying Adobe
Acrobat. The
quality of CutePDF Writer documents is is very good, about the same as
Adobe Acrobat generated documents.
Other free writers don’t seem to do as good a job. You will also need
Ghostscript (see next item below).
|
|
| Ghostscript
and GSView
Windows/Linux
| Postscript
and pdf file compiler. Needed
for CutePDF and for GSView.
GSView is a postscript file viewer and also works as a
Postscript to PDF distiller (or vice versa).
|
| | |
LaTeX
| Getting Started, Intro to LaTeX
| Webpages that help you get started installing and using a TeX/ LaTeX distribution.
|
| The Tex Collection
Windows, Mac, Linux
| This
webpage has links to the primary TeX distributions for each of the
major platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux/Unix). The Windows LaTeX
distribution is MikTeX (see below) which is included in the ProTeXt
bundle (also below).
|
| ProTeXt
Windows
| This
is an installer program that will install a full LaTeX
editing
system
on your computer in one easy step. It will install MikTeX (see next item) and
you
can
choose either the WinEdt editor (NOT FREE, see below) or
TeXnicCenter
(FREE, and also very good). For first-time users or returning
users who want a hassle free installation of a latex editor and compiler in one, this is probably the way to
go. Download the .exe file for the latest version.
The
installation is accomplished by clicking on the links within the pdf
document. Here's
the link to the TeX User Group (TUG) homepage for ProTeXt which has
some more information.
|
|
| MikTeX
Windows | The
version of TeX/LaTeX that you should use if you’re on a Windows machine. ProTeXt
, above will install MikTeX. So, if you've downloaded ProTeXt,
you don't need to download MikTeX separately. If you want to
use a different editor/front end to LaTeX than the choices provided by
ProTeXt (TeXnicCenter and WinEdt), you should download MikTeX
separately, otherwise downloading ProTeXt is the easiest way to go.
BTW, you can find a decent LaTeX manual here.
|
| LaTeX Editors (i.e. front ends) | TeXnicCenter
Windows | TeXnicCenter
is included with ProTeXt above. However, if you want to install
MikTeX separately, or want to use another LaTeX distribution, or you
already have a LaTeX distribution installed, you can install
TeXnicCenter separately. You
will need to install MikTeX (or other LaTeX distribution), Ghostscript,
GSView (see above) and Adobe Reader before installing TeXnicCenter.
|
| LEd
Windows | This
is an alternative option to TeXnicCenter, and a good one. You
will need to install MikTeX, Ghostscript, GSView and Adobe Reader
separately. (Best to install LEd last.) LEd interfaces
perfectly with MikTeX plus has full dictionaries and
thesauri. The documentation on the website is isn't too bad
and
insallation was a breeze. It recognized my MikTeX
installation,
my pdf browser, GSview etc. Everything worked. It
also
allows you to chose
automatic updating of the program from the web.
|
| | WinEdt
(NOT FREE)
Windows
| To my
knowledge, WinEdt is the best Latex editor available for any platform. It is fairly cheap to
purchase but not free after the 30 day free trial period. WinEdt is preconfigured to
work with MiKTeX (below) and it also has syntax highlighting and
indentation rules etc. for a number of programming languages.
Basically, it's an all-around excellent text editor. I wrote my thesis
with it.
|
| Kile
Linux
| This
is the Linux equivalent of the above Windows editors. Kile
does
the job and does it pretty well. No serious contenders that I
know of on the Linux side.
|
| LaTeX Examples | Sample (Very Simple) LaTeX paper | Simplest
possible LaTeX document. Compiles on ly in pure LaTeX (Green
arrow in LEd). Won't compile in PDFTex due to the .eps format
figure. (PDFTex requires .pdf, .jpg, .bmp, etc. format figures).
|
| Sample (Simple) LaTeX paper | Sample
LaTeX document. Use this sample paper as a template for lab
reports or to learn LaTeX. Note: Due the inclusion of
figures that are not in .eps format, it will only compile under PDFTex
(blue arrow in LEd, green arrow won't work).
|
| Sample (Complex) LaTeX paper | Sample
LaTeX document. If you can compile this, your LaTeX
installation is in pretty good shape. You will want to leave the
physics.sty file in the same directory as the main .tex file or in a directory in the LaTeX compiler's path. BTW,
you may find the physics.sty file very useful for many of your physics papers.
It provides a number of commands to improve the ease of using basic physics notation in LaTeX.
|
| LaTeX Screen Shots | LEd, TeXnicCenter | Screen shots of my test LaTeX editor installations.
|
| | |
| Bibliography Software
| JabRef
Windows, Linux,
OSX | A
bibliography manager.
EndNote is the commercial windows equivalent.
This bibliography
manager's native tongue is BibTeX which makes it particularly
appropriate for LaTeX users. I like it very much.
|
| Octave
| Octave.org
Linux/ (Windows – see Octave-forge below)
| Octave
is a free, syntax-compatible clone of Matlab. The link to the download
area is at the bottom of the page, and here. In other words,
programs that you write in Octave should also run in Matlab.
|
|
| Octave-forge
Linux/Windows/Mac
| This
is
the download page of the user contributions to Octave and to the
Windows version of Octave. The homepage of the user contributions is here. The homepage has instructions and also a link to the Windows and Mac installers.
Here’s
another useful link to a professor at Carlton who
uses Octave. |
| Linux
& Windows in harmony
| Unison
Linux/Windows/Solaris/OSX etc.
| Unison
is the only cross-platform, free file-system synchronizer that I know
of and it is awesome. I
couln’t live without it. For
use with windows I have both Putty and Cygwin installed. Unison will install
directly under Cygwin and this may be the easiest way to set it up
under Windows. Personally, I use the straight Windows port which is not
at all easy to set up. See
here
and here
for some help on that approach.
|
|
| Cygwin
Windows
| Cygwin
allows you to run many popular Linux/Unix applications directly within
Windows. Therefore,
this is much faster than a Virtal Machine (see above).
For example, it allows you to run an XWindows server so
that you can ship the graphical output of remote Linux/Unix programs
directly to your desktop. The
Cygwin “setup.exe” is very nice. You
can run it repeatedly, each time choosing wich Linux/Unix programs to
add or remove from your system from a large array of choices.
|
| VMware
Server
Windows/Linux
| Want to
run Windows inside a window on the Linux Desktop or vice versa? VMware Server lets you do
that by making a “virtual machine” within a window on your “host”
machine. You will
need a copy of the operating system you want to run on the virtual
machine.
|
|
| ext2fs, ext2ifs, explore2fs
Windows
| All of
these will allow windows to mount the Linux partitions as separate
drive letters. Only
ext2fsd
(download from the ext2fs homepage) has write
support. Explore2fs
is easiest to use and install. Most Linux distributions now allow you
to read and write to a Windows FAT32 file systems and some disributions
also enable you to write to Windows NTFS file systems.
|
