LaTeX

Florida Atlantic University
Empirical Software Engineering Laboratory

LaTeX

This page provides information on LaTeX that may be of interest to the ESEL community.

Guidelines for LaTeX Documents for ESEL

LaTeX is a typesetting system that is used in academia. It has very strong capabilities for typesetting mathematics beautifully and for managing bibliographies. LaTeX is a markup language which resembles a programming language. Consequently, learning to use LaTeX is similar to learning a programming language.

Due to its capabilities compared to alternative packages and its use among technical publishers, the Empirical Software Engineering Laboratory (ESEL) at Florida Atlantic University has chosen LaTeX as its standard typesetting tool. LaTeX is open-source software, which is available for free over Internet. (See http://www.loria.fr/tex/english/ for information.) LaTeX2e is the current version.

Using Microsoft Word for typesetting (*.doc files) is not permitted for preparing ESEL papers and reports.

Because LaTeX source files are ASCII, Microsoft Word may be used to edit text files (*.txt).

All ESEL students should purchase a LaTeX book.

There are several good books available on how to use LaTeX; purchase of one is a good investment. There are also information resources on the Web. See the ESEL Web page under resources for links. This paper assumes you are familiar with LaTeX basics. Try some simple short documents as you study your LaTeX book before reading this paper.

This paper is not a tutorial on LaTeX. However, it is an example. You can look at the *.tex files that are components of this paper and see how to implement various features. The component files can be downloaded below.

The full version of this paper explains various template files and style files that make preparing ESEL papers much easier.

Download files:

Postscript version of full guidelines (200K).

Components of guidelines document.