Example of Using Latex to Create PDF Document

Donald Daniel June 2, 2010

Publication of technical papers on the internet is hampered by the difculty of presenting fancy mathematical equations and crisp detailed line graphics in an ordinary HTML web page. Pdf documents can solve this problem. They are not read with a browser, but your browser can download them to your disk, then you can read them with Adobe Acrobat on Windows, or with gv on Linux. A simple graph can be generated directly by a simple program written by the user. More elaborate graphs of computer generated data can be produced using the linux program gnuplot. Mechanical and electrical drawings can be generated by the linux program xg. All of these kinds of graphics and more can be included in the nal pdf document using Latex. This is intended to be a simple practical example of the creation of a pdf document containing a computer generated graph using a linux system. The texlive-latex-base package on linux contains the Latex word processing system, and various supporting pieces of software. The texlive-latex-basedoc package contains the documentation, which appears at /usr/share/doc/texlivelatex-base-doc after installation. This example was done using Debian Linux Lenny on a computer using the AMD64 type chip, with no modication or conguration of the stock software package. This document was rst created as the le pdfex.tex in plain text using the vi editor. A link to pdfex.tex is contained in www.waltzballs.org/ other/ 1

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Figure 1: This is temp1.eps pdf.html. In pdfex.tex the rst six commands and the last command would probably be in most simple latex documents that include graphics. The group of six commands to include the gure in the middle of pdfex.tex would be repeated for each gure. Latex oats the gures to convenient locations in the text. The gure in this document was created with the program graf1 contained in the article How to Program a Computer found at http:// www.waltzballs.org/ other/ prog.html. The computer program creates the le temp1. The le temp1 must be converted from ordinary Postscript to Encapsulated Postscript (eps). This is done by looking at it with the linux program gv. With the cursor in gv the lower left coordinates are found to be 154, 366. The upper right are 465, 587. Using the vi editor, the line %%BoundingBox: 154 366 465 587 is added in temp1 after the rst line. Temp1 is now an eps le. Its name must be changed to temp1.eps. The graph in Figure 1 shows the result. The original latex version of this document, pdfex.tex, was converted to pdfex.dvi with the two commands latex pdfex latex pdfex where the same command must be issued twice to resolve references to citations and gures. If the command is not issued twice, the references will 2

appear as question marks. At this point Latex has created for us pdfex.dvi, which is the new form of our document, and pdfex.log, which contains a log of the transformation process, including error messages, if any. Pdfex.aux is for the use of latex, and we can ignore it. Then, the le pdfex.dvi was converted to the postscript le pdfex.ps with the command: dvips -Pcmz pdfex > pdfex.ps Finally, the le pdfex.ps was converted to pdf with the command ps2pdf pdfex.ps The nal result, pdfex.pdf can be viewed and printed from gv with the command: gv pdfex.pdf The -Pcmz option for dvips produces type 1 fonts; without it bitmapped fonts would be produced. They both print well on a printer, but on most computers, type 1 fonts look better on the screen. The particular font chosen here is computer modern. The documentation in /usr/share/doc/ is scattered in several dierent subdirectories. It will probably be sucient for the needs of most users, but references [1] [2] will help for more exacting requirements.

References
[1] Helmut Kopka and Patrick W. Daly, A Guide to Latex, third edition, Addison-Wesley, 1999. [2] Henry McGilton and Mary Campione, Postscript by Example, Addison-Wesley, 1992.