Well, you need LaTeX or some package to process your LaTeX files.
Since I’m running OSX I installed fink1.
Then as root or using sudo, I installed tetex (complete typesetting system). Open a terminal and type:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install tetex
Once, you have this, I think you can go from there. Use any old text editor and the command line to process your files. Suppose you have a file, first.tex, open up the terminal and type:
latex first.tex
This gives you a .dvi file. You can now create either a postscript file or pdf files as I have been doing:
dvipdfm first.dvi
I’m really not sure what the difference is between dvidpdf and dvipdfm. Maybe someone can tell me.
And voilà there is your first late file from tex.
Okay…you actually have to type proper commands in there but we’ll get to that.
Even though using any old text editor is fine, it would be advisable to get a nice editor just for LaTeX files. And we’ll get into that. Eventually I’ll get into windows too.
