Scientific Communication CITS7200 Lecture 1 Introduction to SciComm and LaTeX

Introduction Two hours per week lectures Three in-semester assignments, with feedback de-coupled from assessment –Generic paper –Literature review –Experimental paper

There is no exam Portfolio of written work submitted at end of semester Comprises (re-worked) assignments plus CV

LaTeX LaTeX is a text mark-up language that produces professionally typeset documents TeX produced by Knuth in 1970s Both accept text plus mark-up commands as input

Benefits Widely available with platform-independent output Accepted by journals and conferences Format defined by style options ASCII text source – , etc dvi, ps and pdf easily distributed

Cross-referencing using symbolic labels Generates overheads Supports indexing Facilitates documentation and manual writing

\documentclass[12pt, a4paper]{article} \usepackage{psfig} \title{A Very Important Paper} \author{Ima Genius} \date{} \begin{document} \make{title} … \end{document}

latex file.tex generates file.dvi dvips file.dvi -o file.ps generates postscript output file.ps ps2pdf file.ps generates pdf output file.pdf pdflatex file.tex generates file.pdf directly Use xdvi, gv, or acroread respectively to render the output