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

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.