This tutorial will walk you through the process of using easylatex.
Please let us know if any part of this tutorial is confusing or incomplete. You can get support for EasyLatex via the easylatex-devel mailing list, at lists dot sourceforge dot net.
Most of the tutorial is for Unix-like systems. In theory, easylatex might run under Windows, but it's never been tested.
Before you even install easylatex, you need to have the program "Perl" installed. You don't need anything else if you will be running EasyLatex from the directory it comes in (in that case, skip to step 1); but if you plan to move to to another directory (say, /usr/local/bin), you'll need to install the Perl module "Getopt::Declare".
For instructions on installing this Perl module, see PerlModuleInstallationTutorial. Remember, you don't need to do this if you will be running EasyLatex from the directory it comes in.
Follow this link, and download the latest version of the "easylatex" package.
First, unzip EasyLatex.
tar -xovzf easylatex.tar.zip
Next, go into the directory that you just unpacked:
cd easylatex
Now, run:
./quickInstall.pl
That's it! EasyLatex should now be installed.
You might want to put the file "easylatex.pl" in your $PATH, or put it in some location like /usr/bin, so that you can run it from anywhere.
Using any word processor, enter the following file and save it as "demo.txt". This file is just to show you some of the capabilities of EasyLatex; you don't have to enter all of it (or any of it) if you don't want to.
The identity matrix is the matrix for which a_ij = 1 when i = j, and 0 everywhere else. For example, in three dimensions, I = [1 0 0 ; 0 1 0 ; 0 0 1].
Here is a column vector: [0 1 0]'.
x \mapsto y
1/3
% note: you can still use normal LaTeX in an easylatex file! for example:
\begin{eqnarray*}
a + b &=& c
\\ a &=& c - b
\\ \begin{array}{ll}
1 & 2
\\ 3 & 4
\end{array}
\end{eqnarray*}
Here are some equations which easylatex will automatically align:
1 + 1 = 2
1 = 2 - 1
0 = 2 - 2
For easylatex to deal with a series of naked equations, like in the last three lines, there must be either an empty line, or the end of the file, both before and after the equations. So, the following lines WON'T be automatically aligned:
1 + 1 = 2
1 = 2 - 1
0 = 2 - 2
Now, execute the file easylatex.pl like this:
./easylatex.pl -ps demo.txt
That's all; now you should have a file called demo.ps in your directory. You can view it with
gv demo.ps