During my DPhil and MSc I used LaTeX to write up my theses. It was quite a steep learning curve at first but now I'm a true convert.
Most of my LaTeX help came from books, but quite alot of it from googling. So I decided to make my own contribution in return using my website.
LaTeX likes your images to be input as a .eps file which is a major pain. Geeks who use 'mogrify' in linux manage this quite well, but what about the rest of us who are using Windows?
Once you have made your image preferably as a .bmp or .jpg there are a number of different programs to turn it into an eps (such as paint, Corel Draw and Photoshop).
However if you try to 'Print to file' although the eps will appear to have been created LaTeX will produce an error like this:
! Text line contains an invalid character.
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To avoid this error use Corel Photo Paint, open the .jpg and use Save As then select EPS - Encapsulated Post Script
I've only ever used LaTeX on Windows and linux so when I came to set up LaTeX on my MacBook recently, I was at a bit of a loss. Searching for "LaTeX for Mac" on google will bring up a lot of complicated advice. The simplest thing to do is to download TeXShop and read its help document. It will tell you everything you need to know to get started.
If you use the "countif" function to count the frequency of a word in a number of cells, you might find it doesn't count them all. Try putting asterisks either side of the word you want to count. e.g.
=COUNTIF(A1:A2,"Black")If you want to
use a different font for your whole document (to
get away from the 'this document has been LaTeXed look') there are a
couple of ways to do it. Using the times package is arguably the
easiest way. Put it in the preamble like
this:
\usepackage{times}
and all of your body text, chapter and section headings will be in Times
font. Use
this:
\usepackage{times,mathptm}
if you want mathmode to be in Times also. This will only work if you
have the correct fonts loaded with your LateX installation.
There is a similar Palatino font package:
\usepackage{palatino}
However, don't be tempted to use the
palatcm package (I couldn't get this to work) use:
\usepackage{mathpazo}
instead, if you want mathmode to be in Palatino.
See this useful
webpage for more information, but this package allow you to change
the settings for all your different headings, e.g. chapter, section,
subsection. In the example below all of the section headings are put
into sans serif font:
\usepackage{sectsty}
\allsectionsfont{\sffamily}
When using the fancyhr package you may find that the headrule stops short of your text. This is because you have called the fancyhr package before defining your textwidth in the preamble. The same applies to the multicol package.