Installing LaTeX on Ubuntu

LaTeX is a very handy and commonly used for editing professional style documents. It is mainly used for writing scientific papers, reports, articles and any official documents.

In Windows, usually we use WinEdt as front end LaTeX editor and Texlive or Miktex as compiler. Texlive is available through Ubuntu repository. But Miktex is not so easily installable in Ubuntu. You have to compile it from scratch after downloading the source from SourceForge.net.

The replacement for WinEdt in Ubuntu might be Kile or Texmaker. Kile is a KDE native applicaton, though you can install it on Ubuntu using Synaptic. But you have to install some KDE libraries which you might not like!

So, I think Texmaker is the best choice. Though it is available through Synaptic, it does not install Texlive as its dependencies [ I was very surprised to learn that ].

Anyway, there are solutions to this problem 🙂

Just select these packages manually after selecting Texmaker on Synaptic and confirming additional packages :

tex-common
texlive-base
texlive-base-bin
texlive-common
texlive-doc-base
texlive-latex-base

After Synaptic downloads and installs the packages, you can edit and compile LaTeX documents.

There is another problem involving Texmaker. It configures ‘xpdf’ as its default PDF viewer. As Ubuntu 8.04 does not have ‘xpdf’, you have to set ‘evince’ as the default PDF viewer. To do so :

1. Go to the OPTIONS menu in Texmaker
2. Select CONFIGURE TEXMAKER
3. On the COMMANDS tab, find ‘Pdf viewer’ text field
4. Replace ‘xpdf’ with ‘evince’ keeping other texts on this field intact.

Now, you are done. You can view PDF by selecting VIEW PDF from TOOLS menu after compiling the document usinf PDFLatex.