Welcome to the UK List of
TeX Frequently Asked Questions
Introduction
This is a set of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) for
English-speaking users of TeX. The questions answered here cover
a wide range of topics, but the actual typesetting issues are mostly
covered from the viewpoint of a LaTeX user.
You may use the FAQ
- by reading a printed document,
- by viewing a PDF file, with hyperlinks to assist
browsing: copies are available formatted for printing on
A4 paper or on
North American “letter” paper, or
- by using the FAQ’s web interface (base URL:
http://www.tex.ac.uk/faq); this version provides simple
search capabilities, as well as a link to Google for a more
sophisticated search restricted to the FAQ itself, or
- via Scott Pakin’s Visual FAQ.
Unless otherwise specified, all files mentioned in this FAQ
are available from a CTAN archive, or from a mirror of
CTAN — see later discussion
of the CTAN
archives and how to retrieve files
from them. If you don’t have access to the internet, the
TeX Live distribution offers off-line snapshots of the
archives.
The reader should also note that the first directory name of the
path name of every file on CTAN is omitted from what
follows, for the simple reason that, while it’s always the same
(tex-archive/) on the main sites, mirror sites often choose
something else.
To avoid confusion, we also omit the full stop from the end of
any sentence whose last item is a path name (such sentences are
rare, and only occur at the end of paragraphs). Though the path
names are set in a different font from running text, it’s not easy
to distinguish the font of a single dot!
Origins
The FAQ was originated by the Committee of the UK
TeX Users’ Group (UK TUG) as a development of a
regular posting to the Usenet newsgroup
comp.text.tex that was maintained for some time by Bobby
Bodenheimer. The first UK version was much re-arranged and
corrected from the original, and little of Bodenheimer’s work now
remains.
The following people (at least — there are almost certainly others
whose names weren’t correctly recorded) have contributed help or
advice on the development of the FAQ: Donald Arseneau,
Rosemary Bailey,
Barbara Beeton,
Karl Berry,
Giuseppe Bilotta,
Charles Cameron,
François Charette,
Damian Cugley,
Michael Dewey,
Michael Downes,
Jean-Pierre Drucbert,
Michael Ernst,
Thomas Esser,
Ulrike Fischer,
Anthony Goreham,
Norman Gray,
Eitan Gurari,
William Hammond,
John Harper,
John Hammond,
Troy Henderson,
Hartmut Henkel,
Stephan Hennig,
John Hobby,
Morten Høgholm,
Berthold Horn,
Ian Hutchinson,
Werner Icking,
William Ingram,
Alan Jeffrey,
Regnor Jernsletten,
David Kastrup,
Oleg Katsitadze,
Isaac Khabaza,
Ulrich Klauer,
Markus Kohm,
Stefan Kottwitz
David Kraus,
Ryszard Kubiak,
Simon Law,
Daniel Luecking,
Aditya Mahajan,
Sanjoy Mahajan,
Andreas Matthias,
Brooks Moses,
Iain Murray,
Vilar Camara Neto,
Dick Nickalls,
Ted Nieland,
Hans Nordhaug,
Pat Rau,
Heiko Oberdiek,
Piet van Oostrum,
Scott Pakin,
Oren Patashnik,
Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard,
Steve Peter,
Sebastian Rahtz,
Philip Ratcliffe,
Chris Rowley,
José Carlos Santos,
Walter Schmidt,
Hans-Peter Schröcker,
Joachim Schrod,
Maarten Sneep,
Axel Sommerfeldt,
Philipp Stephani,
James Szinger,
Ulrik Vieth,
Mike Vulis,
Chris Walker,
Peter Wilson,
Joseph Wright,
Rick Zaccone and
Reinhard Zierke.
The Background
Documentation and Help
Bits and pieces of (La)TeX
Acquiring the Software
TeX Systems
DVI Drivers and Previewers
Support Packages for TeX
Literate programming
Format conversions
Installing (La)TeX files
Fonts
Metafont fonts
Adobe Type 1 (“PostScript”) fonts
Macros for using fonts
Particular font families
Hypertext and PDF
Graphics
Bibliographies and citations
Creating bibliographies
Creating citations
Manipulating whole bibliographies
Adjusting the typesetting
Alternative document classes
Document structure
Page layout
Spacing of characters and lines
Typesetting specialities
Tables of contents and indexes
Labels and references
How do I do...?
Mathematics
Lists
Tables, figures and diagrams
Floating tables, figures, etc.
Footnotes
Document management
Hyphenation
Odds and ends
Symbols, etc.
Macro programming
“Generic” macros and techniques
LaTeX macro tools and techniques
LaTeX macro programming
Things are Going Wrong...
Getting things to fit
Making things stay where you want them
Things have “gone away”
Why does it do that?
Common errors
Common misunderstandings
Why shouldn’t I?
The joy of TeX errors
Current TeX-related projects
You’re still stuck?
Comments, suggestions, or error reports? -- see
"Improving the FAQ" or
"Extending the FAQ".
This is FAQ version 3.19, last modified on 2009-06-10.