Installing Tex Live Under Windows

The TeX Live install bundle found at TeX Live Windows installation makes perl crash under Windows. The workaround is to use some other perl bundle. Currently there are two major perl distributions, Active State Perl (our favorite) and Strawberry Perl. To work around the problem:

Install either Active State Perl or Strawberry Perl from the links above.
Right click the install-tl.bat file from the install-tl.zip and select Edit so the installer dos code shows up.

Change the following lines:

rem Use TL Perl
set "path=%!!%path%"
set "PERL5LIB=%~dp0tlpkg\tlperl\lib"

to the following:

rem Use TL Perl
rem set "path=%~dp0tlpkg\tlperl\bin;%path%"
rem set "PERL5LIB=%~dp0tlpkg\tlperl\lib"

which comments out the TeX Live installer perl settings and uses the system-wide perl you installed in the first step.

Using non-Latin Characters

The most elegant way is to use UTF8 encodings for both the bibliography file and the document. UTF8 has to be supported by the operating system and the editor (popular latex editors allow you to change the character encoding in their preferences). Then add in the preamble:

\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T2A]{fontenc}
\usepackage[russian,english]{babel}

this will render UTF8 (keyboard-generated) characters exactly as they are. The third line allows you to specify languages used in the document.

Change Font inside Verbatim Environment

This can be done by surrounding the verbatim environment by begingroup and endgroup and then using fontsize to select the font size and the line spacing.

\begingroup
    \fontsize{8pt}{10pt}\selectfont
    \begin{verbatim}  
        This font is 8pt. 
    \end{verbatim}  
\endgroup

The first parameter to fontsize is the font size (8pt) and the second parameter represents the line spacing (10pt).

Update To LaTeX2e

LaTeX2e is the current LaTeX version and usually has to be installed on top of an initial install. For example, on the Amiga, the PasTeX LaTeX distribution can be updated by copying over the files from LaTeX2e in the texmf directory as described.

First, we need to get the latest LaTeX distribution from CTAN. We are only interested in the base directory which we can download.

Then unpack the base directory:

tar -zxpvf base.tar.gz

which will produce a base directory containing all the necessary files. Some of these files have to be installed into the local latex distribution which is by convention referred to texmf where all the LaTeX files are placed.

Now, unpack the distribution to generate the LaTeX format files:

cd base
initex unpack.ins
initex latex.ltx

From the base directory, copy all the required files:

cp latex.fmt latex.log /usr/share/texmf/web2c
cp *.fd *.cls *.clo *.sty *.def *.tex /usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/base
cp *.ist /usr/share/texmf/makeindex

and then test the installation using the provided ltxcheck.tex:

mkdir tmp
cd tmp
cp ../ltxcheck.tex ./
latex ltxcheck.tex

Regenerate LaTeX Format

Find the latex.ltx file which is usually located under texmf/tex/latex/base/latex.ltx. Change directory to the first directory up (in this case base). Then issue:

initex latex.ltx

and copy the resulting latex.fmt and latex.log to texmf/web2c.

Hide Sections at Compile Time Using a Conditional

First we create the conditional:

\newif\ifanswers

then we create a toggle:

\answerstrue % comment out to hide answers

which will show the text in case it is not commented.

Finally, any block that should not appear on the page can be surrounded by \ifanswers and \fi:

\ifanswers
The solution is here!
\fi

Number Sets

Number sets can be displayed using the amsfonts or the amssymb packages.

Latex	Description
`\mathbb{P}`	prime numbers $\mathbb{P}$
`\mathbb{W}`	whole numbers $\mathbb{W}$
`\mathbb{N}`	natural numbers $\mathbb{N}$
`\mathbb{Z}`	integers $\mathbb{Z}$
`\mathbb{I}`	irrational numbers $\mathbb{I}$
`\mathbb{Q}`	rational numbers $\mathbb{Q}$
`\mathbb{R}`	real numbers $\mathbb{R}$
`\mathbb{C}`	complex numbers $\mathbb{C}$