I personally recommend WinShell, a nice piece of freeware that I’ve been using for nearly a decade! (Even though it’s freeware, I recommend sending a little donation to the author if you find it useful.) There’s a single download and installation involved with WinShell. You can use any text-manipulating software to write your LaTeX file, but numerous nice text editors exist which make using MiKTeX easy. You’ll need to run the installer twice once to download the package, once to install it. The last time I checked, it took about 500 MB. Personally, I prefer the complete download, which includes pretty much every ‘add-on’ you might ever need. Now you’re ready for the main installation! Download the installer at this link in principle you only need the basic MiKTeX installer. The most recent version of Ghostscript should be downloaded and installed, followed by the most recent version of GSView. Both pieces of software can be found at this link. GSview is a viewer that allows viewing of postscript files. Ghostscript is a piece of software used by the LaTeX compiler to convert and display these Postscript files. The most common format for putting figures in LaTeX documents is to use Postscript or encapsulated Postscript format. All are free! You should download and install each of the tools below in the order presented: To use LaTeX in Windows, two tools are essential, and a third is highly recommended. In the case of C++ or Fortran, the final form is an executable program, while in the case of LaTeX, the result is a formatted and printable document. The programming file is run through a compiler which converts it into its final form. LaTeX is a compiled language, like C++ or Fortran. A LaTeX file (.tex extension) is a text file which contains the text of the document, along with programming ‘code’ that specifies special structures, like tables, quotations, references and, of course, equations.

LaTeX is, essentially, a specialized programming language that is tailored towards producing professional-quality electronic documents. Since I often have to do this for my students anyway, it’ll be nice to have it all in one place.

I thought I’d write a little introduction on how to install and use LaTeX, with a nice sample file to play with. In the comments section, a number of people asked about how to learn to use the software. There was a nice post on Good Math, Bad Math about Donald Knuth’s classic scientific typesetting software, TeX.

Latex text editor freeware