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a few notes on LaTeX on the Mac
(on McTrash, to be precise)
First,
you need a LaTeX system. OS X being Unix, there are traditional ways (designed
for sysadmins) that work. OS X being Mac OS, there is also an iCute way, called
i-Installer:
i-Installer
(by Gerben Wierda)
Download II2.dmg, about half way down the page.
You should tell it to install the following pieces: TeX, ghostscript, ImageMagick, libiconv, libwmf, freetype2, fondu, and cm-super. It'll take a little to do all this, you will hear the hard drive working hard.
New 2006: An even shorter-cut way to install this is with something called MacTex. You download one big archive, which it unpacks to give you what i-Installer would build up in pieces, plus i-Installer itself (for updates) plus TeXShop and XeTeX and a few other things. I haven't used this, but it's what I'd try next time.
Typing LaTeX by hand isn't hard (you'll want TeXShop),
but gets tedious when you have lots of equations. What you want is LyX,
which cleverly allows you to type equations graphically without forcing you
to do so: you can find the button for things you don't know, but if you just
type x^2, or \alpha, it understands.
With imagemagik installed as above, you can use graphics in almost any format for figures: tiff, jpeg, pdf as well as the traditional eps. (Needless to say, you shouldn't convert things to pixels unless you have to.)
BibTeX works fine with LyX, you get your references ready-formatted from Spires. You'll probably want arXiv-aware bib styles.
A powerful package for designing your own chapter headings and such is
titlesec
with a good manual titlesec.pdf
The simplest use of this is to just put, say, \usepackage[md,it,ss]{titlesec} into the preamble. (In LyX, that's Layout > Document > Preamble.) This will make your headings mdseries (i.e. not bold) italic and sans-serif. It's not hard to make up more complicated layouts following the examples in the manual.
Even if you don't think Computer Modern, the default TeX font, is ugly, you do have to admit that it's very light, very wide, and massively over-used. You can select to use one of these packages in LyX's font drop-down box:
times = Times New Roman
palatio
newcent = New Century Schoolbook
charter
bookman (which also changes the sans-serif and typewriter)
These are all part of the packages psnfss (PDF manual). They change only the text font, leaving the mathematics in Computer Modern, which looks a little odd as CM is so much lighter.
There are variants of times and palatino called mathtpmx and mathpazo which change the mathematics too, although in a slightly half-hearted way: many of the more fancy symbols are borrowed from CM. There are better alternatives, they have their own section below.
New 2006: i-Installer now automatically grabs and converts some of the nice fonts that come with OS X (like Baskerville, Hoefler Text, Gill Sans and Optima) and makes them available to LaTeX. Unfortunately this doesn't work on my installation (Sept 2005 on 10.3) but I'd believe it would on a fresh one. There's not much documentation online, this post explains the rough idea. If you've got it installed look in /Library/teTeX/share/texmf.gwtex/doc/fonts/gtamacfonts/ for details.
One easy way to use any fonts you've got installed is a thing called XeTeX, which is pretty much a drop-in replacement for TeX (and
XeLaTeX for LaTeX):
XeTeX
(by Jonathan Kew)
Available in i-Installer under "Jonathan Kew's i-Directory"
(and part of the MacTeX bundle)
For easy control of what it does, use
fontspec
excellent manual fontspec.pdf
This LyX wiki page describes how to tell LyX to use XeLaTeX instead of ordinary LaTeX. (If all this font stuff is terribly confusing (what's a ligature, anyway?) then the quick & funny Thinking With Type is for you.)
Two complete mathematical symbol sets you probably alread have installed are:
txfonts = Times New Roman + matching mathematics
pxfonts = Palatino + the samefourier = Adobe Utopia text + a matching maths set (PDF manual)
To use these, simply add \usepackage{ package name } to the preamble. There is also a new variant called FourierNC (December 2005) which gives you New Century Schoolbook with fourier's symbols.
As mentioned above, the packages
mathtpmx = Times New Roman + maths
mathpazo = Palatino + the same
contain some mathematical symbols, but revert to CM for more esoteric ones (like \otimes) which I think looks odd.
For more choice, you'll need to install packages. I've made step-by-step instructions for these two:
mathdesign = maths for Utopia, URW Garamond, and Charter
MinionPro + MnSymbol
The first are free fonts (and in fact MikTeX on the PC seems to have these by default.) Adobe Minion (Pro) is a commercial font, but it comes with the free Adobe Reader (ex Acrobat).
The only sans-serif mathematics package installed be default is
hfbright = CM's sans-serif + matching maths
And then there are the Euler fonts. They are certainly different, very upright and designed especially for mathematics (by H. Zapf, of Palatino and Optima fame.) They were originally to go with the Concrete Maths fonts (which are sort-of typewriter style), and are called by the packages
concrete = Euler maths with Concrete text
eulervm / euler = Euler maths, but no change to text
concmath = Concrete for both text and mathematics
There is also mathppl, which uses Euler greek & symbols but Palatino text and maths-letters.
For sans-serif text with mathematics, you could also try Helvetica with Euler: \renewcommand{\rmdefault}{phv} \usepackage{eulervm} . The Euler symbols aren't as easily overwhelmed as CM.
Kerkis & kmath promise a Bookman set.
Then there are mbtimes and bellek for Times.
Plus packages for sans-serif maths: arev, iwona and kurier. arevdoc.pdf contains good samples of all the sans-serif maths fonts available.
Mathkit uses black magic to make matching fonts, like zadpad for Adobe Garamond
I haven't managed to make these work yet, but will post something here when I do.
See also this FAQ on maths fonts, and Stephen Hartke's comprehensive page of samples.
by Michael Abbott,
michael_abbott@brown.edu
unchanged since 13 February, 2006
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