[OS X TeX] Students could use some help

[Jeffrey J Weimer]

On Apr 9, 2007, at 3:15 PM, Daniel Culver wrote:

> I am trying to help some high school students use gwtex with  
> Texshop 2.10 beta to write a simple report. We are on a G-5 PPC w/  
> OSX 10.4.up to date. We started with \documentclass[12pt]{article}  
> because we thought that would be easiest. The preamble is nothing  
> more than this right now. I have been consulting The Latex  
> Companion, Tug, MacTex site, and Nasa site.

Find a copy of "A Guide to LaTeX 2e" from Kopka and Daly. IMO, it is  
a much better companion for doing LaTeX than the companion.

> I am more confused than ever. I would like a little help getting  
> back in the right direction.

Try the code below, documented so your students might see what the  
commands are telling LaTeX to do ...

%% Basic LaTeX Document

%% this defines the document class to be an article at 12pt font on  
US letter paper

\documentclass [12pt,letterpaper]{article}

%% set the font to be Helvetica

\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[full]{textcomp}
\usepackage{helvet}

%% document settings to give 1" margins all around

\textwidth=6.5in
\textheight=9in
\topmargin=-0.25in  % this puts the page number at 0.75in from the top
\headheight=0in % no depth to the header - does not matter!
\headsep=0.25in % this adds back the topmargin space to start the  
text 1in from the top
\oddsidemargin=0in
\evensidemargin=0in

%% set the line spacing to double space (twice the selected type size)

\renewcommand{\baselinestretch}{2}

%% page style settings to put page numbers in proper place by default

\pagestyle{headings}

\begin{document}

%% First Page

%% override default page style for no page numbers and skip down 3"

\thispagestyle{empty}
\vspace*{3in}

%% Here is the title - format it as you like ...

This is the Title of My Document

%% now skip to the bottom of the page and put the page number on the  
right
%% (use \begin{center}\thepage\end{center} to put page number in center)

\vfill
\hspace*{\fill}\thepage

%% on to the next page

\clearpage

Here is the text of the first page of the document. My goodness, how  
nicely \LaTeX\ typesets this document! I can even type a beautifully  
formated math equation

\[A_{circle} = \pi r^2\]

\noindent I think, I will throw away my MS Word program and become a  
TeXXie!

\clearpage

Here is another page as a test.

\end{document}



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