LaTeX: A guide for philosophers

LaTeX is a fantastic tool for philosophers of all stripes - though it excels at typesetting the complicated formulas of logicians, it has distinct advantages for all philosophers. (I discuss some of these here. ) If you are here, I assume you want to learn how to use LaTeX. You can find vast amounts of information on LaTeX online. But this is not entirely helpful. Much of it is written for scientists; most of it is written by people who are very capable technologically. While there are certainly philosophers who are technically inclined, comfortable with using the command line and/or writing code, etc., most of us are not. This is a guide to using LaTeX for those who either are not technologically inclined or who do not have the time to poke around and figure everything out on their own.

LaTeX can seem overwhelming and complex. It needn’t be. There are three basic steps to producing your first LaTeX document. If you want to stop there, you will reap (practically) all the benefits of LaTeX. If you want to go further, it seems there is no end to the amount you can learn. My objective in these pages is to get you to a workable understanding of LaTeX with a minimum effort (on your part). After reading these pages, you should know how to write all your papers using LaTeX. If you want to jump ahead, click on the next page below. If you would like to know a bit more about LaTeX before we begin, read on.

Writing a paper in LaTeX is more complicated than writing a paper in a word processor in two ways. First, you have to be more explicit using LaTeX than you would with a word processor. Second, there are a few steps between typing the words on your keyboard and producing a finished document in LaTeX, not so with a word processor.

LaTeX is, in the first instance, a markup language. So when you ‘write a paper in LaTeX’, what you are really doing is creating a plain text file (with a .tex extension–so paper.tex, for example) filled with your content and some explicit instructions. The basic instructions are not that complicated, and your text editor will help you write them, but you do have to be explicit about inserting them.

The instructions you write in that plain text file are used in the steps between typing the paper and producing a finished product. Once you have a file, you run it through LaTeX. This is the step of compiling your paper, turning it from a plain text file into a PDF. (Note, there is the option to turn your paper into a .dvi file. I am certain there is some reason to want to do this. But I know that I have never had such a reason, and I bet you will be like me in this regard, so I will ignore that here.) All the little bits of code you explicitly insert into your paper are instructions that LaTeX uses to translate the .tex file into a .pdf file.

Writing a paper in a word processor is kind of like a packaged cupcake. All the formatting work is done for you. Writing a paper in LaTeX is kind of like baking a cake: you mix up raw ingredients and you don’t have anything very special–you have a sort of ugly plain text file full of code that, were you to print, would be confusing to someone who didn’t know LaTeX. But just as you have to put a cake in the oven to produce delicious goodness, so too must you put your .tex file through a process to get out the typesetting-goodness that is a LaTeX document.

If you do not already have a TeX distribution on your system, click here to continue; if you do have a TeX distribution, click here. (If you don’t know if you have a TeX distribution, look at the applications or programs on your computer. If you have a Mac and see TeXShop, or if you have a PC and see TeXworks or TeXnicCenter, then you have a TeX distribution installed.)

Fontes: http://www.charlietanksley.net/latex/

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