Talk:LaTeX/Absolute Beginners

From Wikibooks, the open-content textbooks collection

[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)