Starting from little or no experience of LaTeX, the
examples given below serve as templates from which portable articles, books,
slideshows, letters, exams, faxes can be created in PDF format.
Traditionally, users of LaTeX created printable Postscript (ps) or just dvi
output; nowadays, when you use a computer in a different place, you may not find
available the necessary viewers for these. However, the free pdf viewers (see below) are
usually already associated with a browser so it is convenient to use
pdf output format and then you can include also hyperlinks, coloured text,
graphics and even movies in your documents, electronic books, and CD/DVD media.
Ghostview can convert Postscript graphics into PDF format for inclusion in articles.
Acrobat Reader can rotate graphics, it has an automatic slideshow mode and the LaTeX slide format is very convenient for
presentations by computer projection---or as printed OHP transparencies.
However, the new beamer
package (cf. below) provides better looking conference slides for computer projection.
In the case of a collection of course documents or a connected series of
articles---possibly including some on remote computers, it is convenient to use
web-based access to the archived resources, as is in operation with the page you
are now reading. Accordingly, the working example of this page is an easily
understood template that you can modify to provide access to your own archived
materials; it has been designed using elementary raw HTML so it is easily
portable. On the other hand, whereas professional web editing facilities (eg
Frontpage, Netscape Composer) are very powerful, they use many hidden or at best
obscure procedures and may bury necessary items in undeclared directories, so it
is hard to create a stand-alone webpage. Using simple raw HTML is sufficient for
most purposes---typically creating and updating a course homepage or carrying a
connected set of documents for discussions and presentations at another
institution where you are unsure of what is available on the PC you will have to
use.
http://www.maths.manchester.ac.uk/~kd/latextut/pdfbyex.htm