How do I typeset my papers?

I used to write papers in Word, either Chinese or English, including my Master's thesis. Word is WYSIWYG, supports style, cross referencing, table of contents, math equations, and very good graphical drawing. However, when I wrote my first TCS paper in Word during my PhD, it was a nightmare. Word is not good at handling large files or math intensive files, and is a proprietary format not accessible by many researchers. I had to switch to LaTeX for my PhD thesis. Fortunately, it was not too late.

Currently, I use LyX(Win32 version)+MiKTeX+cygwin+Windows for typesetting my papers/slides. Sadly, there are still a lot of students (especially Chinese) who can not give up Word for the pain of learning LaTeX. For anyone who is interested in switching to LaTeX, I put here a recent source burdle (my Express'04 paper) as your start point (tar.gz, 1.3MB). It is prepared under Windows with the additional software (LyX,MiKTex,cygwin) installed, but a full Linux distribution like Fedora Core will have everything needed for compiling. Don't worry about the obscure TeX source file. Click here to see how wonderful the GUI support of LyX is.

However, it is very important to know how LaTeX works while using LyX.

It is also a drawback of LaTeX for the GUI support of drawing graphics. Although software like xfig is an easy way to do this, I prefer the more prefessional MetaPost, a powerful scripting language for technical drawings. There is a graph prepared using it in the example source burdle above.

Here are a few handy links for working with LaTeX:

  • List of Mathematical Symbols
  • Command index
  • MetaPost examples

    Please feel free to contact me for any comments/questions.

    Last modified: Fri Oct 15 10:36:15 GMTDT 2004