Talk:LaTeX/Absolute Beginners

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[edit] why ps2pdf?

What's the good point of doing tex-->ps-->pdf to create a PDF if you can simply do tex--> PDF? in the first (old) approach you get bad fonts, no hyperlinks, etc. Creating the PDF straight away you'll get a good document with high quality pictures and internal links, why shouldn't we suggest to use pdflatex whenever possible?? Alessio Damato 13:07, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] How exactly do I create output from my *.tex source file?

This chapter lacks precise information on how exactly output files (*.pdf, *.dvi, *.eps, etc.) are obtained from the *.tex source file. I myself have downloaded MikTeX 2.7 and pdflatex is included. I also have my *.tex file. Where do I place it and how exactly do I use this pdflatex plugin to produce an output file?

See the section "A Typical Command Line Session". The details regarding pdflatex aren't there, but they should be (and I'll add it). You might also want to consider installing a nice editor to write the tex files, and compile the PDF, etc. documents by pressing buttons (rather than typing commands from a command prompt). I'd recommend Texmaker, which is free. From this program, I just click on the "PDFLAT" button, then the Adobe reader button, and then I can see the output. +mt 22:29, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

Lots of tex editors have compliers built right into them. I use TeXnicCenter and it has a button "build and view current file" that does the wacky command line stuff for you. Perhaps the command line is used because there's such a huge amount of tex editors out there (with no real standard version I guess), or because of a million other reasons, but if you're using a tex editor that's fairly mainstream, there should be a button that does the cmd line stuff for you. -ai 1:24, 26 May 2008

[edit] Explanation of environments

Where can I get more information about environments which is used by \begin command? These environments are used in many pages like in "Title Creation" but I can not find in the right side floating TOC the explanation of them.