Introduction

LaTeX is an application mostly used by people involved in computer science or mathematics at the universities to create nice-lookng printed documents in a simple way. Many people feel that using LaTeX is a better way to create documents than using a word processor or a desktop publishing program. The option to use LaTeX on your Amiga has existed for a long time. It doesn't even have to cost anything. There are problems though:

o the packages are often difficult to install even for experienced Amiga users o the documentation is more often than not in German (!) o the documentation is poor o it's hard to know what utilities are needed; several different ones actually do the same thing o different versions of the same utilities are floating around - it's hard to know if you use the most recent or not

I've worked my way through a part of this jungle, and I though my experiences could help others. But please note that I'm not in any way a LaTeX wizard - yet.

What is LaTeX?

Back in 1984 or so, the famous computer scientist Don Knuth created the language TeX, mainly for typesetting mathematical formulas. He made TeX expandable for the user; anyone could expand TeX with his own macros The basic set of functions that Knuth implemented was called Plain TeX.

A few years later, Leslie Lamport created LaTeX, a set of TeX macros which made writig documents much easier. You write your text with your favourite text editor as usual, but insert special commands like for emphasizing a piece of text (by turning on italic) or

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