Which TeX frontends are installed?
How can I produce good-quality PDF files from TeX and LaTeX?
Producing html from LaTeX?
xdvi just keeps looping over some font checking?
How can I view and print .texinfo and .dvi files?
How to project a landscape format .ps file, generated from LateX, as a slide show?
The landscape document class option doesn't work?

Which TeX frontends are installed?

LyX provides a word-processor like front-end to LaTeX. You will find that LaTeX documents are nearly always superior to Word documents, with much less effort required to achieve good results. In addition, students are being encouraged to write up projects using LaTeX rather than Word, so LyX is a good starting place. To run LyX just type lyx at the command line.

TeXmacs isn't a true TeX frontend, but uses the Metafont system (the same fonts as used by TeX) to produce high-quality printed output, and a WYSIWYG frontend. It saves files in its own XML-ish .tm format; there are import and export filters to the various breeds of TeX but I would not expect them to retain all formatting elements. If you're required to produce pure, high-quality LaTeX for conference paper submissions, for example, then TeXmacs isn't suitable (yet).

Producing html from LaTeX?

latex2html is installed by default, and seems to work well.

xdvi just keeps looping over some font checking?

It may have appeared to be looping, but my guess is that it was generating different fonts (or sizes) on each pass. It can take up to five minutes for the first document to pop out of xdvi on any particular machine (the fonts are built when first used, not when they are installed - clever huh?).

You may find it much quicker and better to run dvips on the dvi, then gv to view it. In my experience, it is always quicker to convert to PostScript then view the PostScript that it is to just view the DVI.

For example:

dvips -o file.ps file.dvi && gv file.ps

How can I view and print .texinfo and .dvi files?

.texinfo files:

Either use "makeinfo" which converts them into hypertext files that can be read by the command "info" (or by the info mode in GNU emacs), or use the command tex, which converts them into .dvi files.

.dvi files:

These can be viewed in X windows using the command xdvi, printed to a laser writer by using the flag "-d" to the lpr command, or converted into Postscript using the dvips program.

A last resort option is to convert them to text files using the command dvi2tty (the .dvi format cannot easily be converted into text, therefore dvi2tty doesn't always do a particularly good job).

How to project a landscape format .ps file, generated from LateX, as a slide show?

Magicpoint is installed under Linux. It is a presentation package for X which has a simple text format for presentations, and which can include postscript as needed. See man mgp for more details. Also some sample presentations and documentation can be found in /usr/share/doc/packages/mgp

NOTE - it has full rotation and scaling options included. For just rotating / resizing postscript files the psutils package contains ps2ps, psresize and pstops which you may find useful.

The landscape document class option doesn't work?

\documentclass[,landscape]{article} is broken. There is an (impressive!) conflict between papersize and landscape in the global documentclass attribute settings which means they argue about textwidth, ultimately resulting in [landscape] being *entirely* ignored!

The right way to do it is:

\documentclass[11pt,a4paper]{article}
\usepackage{landscape}
\def\printlandscape{\special{landscape}}
\special{! TeXDict begin /landplus90{true}store end }
\begin{document}
Content
\end{document}

xdvi doesn't understand landscape, so don't try and view raw DVI in there.

Also remember to run dvips as 'dvips -t landscape', otherwise you'll just get a portrait A4 page with a landscape \textwidth.

© CSG / 2002