Writing a New Mexico Tech thesis with LaTeX |  |
Writing a New Mexico Tech thesis with LaTeX | |
These instructions are for using LaTeX at the New Mexico Tech Computer Center (TCC). You may prefer to do all your development elsewhere; however, for the final printed document, the TCC provides printers that can enforce the strict dimensional requirements of the Graduate Office.
Here is the procedure for developing a LaTeX thesis.
Download these two files into the same directory as your document.
Make a copy of the mythesis.tex file with some name of your
choice, but the file's name must end in “.tex”. This will be the LaTeX file for
your thesis.
There are a number of different tools for editing LaTeX
files. All you need is a basic text editor such as
Notepad in Windows or emacs or vim under MacOS or Linux. See the Wikipedia
article mentioned in Section 2, “Resources for the writer” for
pointers to a number of fancier systems for LaTeX
writers, such as LyX.
Compile the LaTeX input file using the pdflatex program. This program converts your
file directly to PDF format. Free reader programs
exist on every platform for this format, such as Adobe
Reader.
If pdflatex detects errors in your
document, correct them and run pdflatex
again.
Documents in PDF format are designed to be printed. However, you must be careful that your printing system does not change the dimensions of your document. See Section 3.1, “Printing PDF files at the Tech Computer Center”.