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LaTeX and Classics, Part One: Mac OS X Setup
Written by Kyle P. Johnson   
Sunday, 13 July 2008 03:53

As Classicists, we are a unique set of professional writers with need of special tools for writing term papers, handouts, curricula vitae, articles, critical editions, translations, and scholarly books. Amid the ubiquity of Microsoft Word, however, alternatives more fitting to the Classicist are often not considered. One such alternative, and a particularly powerful at that, is LaTeX (pronounced "lay–tek").

If you have never heard of LaTeX before, all you need to know is that it is a professional–grade digital typesetting system that is capable of producing beautiful documents. Not only this, but it is free and open source. Better than my explaining what it can do is to see for yourself examples of the sorts of the mundane (chances are, many of your favorite journals and books are done in LaTeX) and spectacular things it can do. (Example One Two Three Four.)

There are numerous detailed resources to get one up and running with this system and I will not be replicating them here. Instead, my idea is to give extremely simplified instructions tailored for a specific audience, so that the learning curve for this system will be quite easy. I now describe the bare necessities for getting LaTeX up and running on Mac OS X (Windows people should try MikTeX). In future posts, I will discuss the other basic aspects of LaTeX necessary for Classicists, including basic commands, unicode (with XeLaTeX), bibliography management and implementation, apparatus critici, facing parallel texts, hyphenation of Greek and Latin, and outputting in other formats (like .rtf, .html, or .doc).

  1. Download the MacTeX .dmg file here (744 MB). Open it and install. Bundled together here is everything you need.
  2. MacTeX made a folder in your Applications folder called TeX. Look in here and open TeXShop. This is the most important program, the one in which you will compose your writing, compile documents, and view them.
  3. To try it out, choose an example from the bar in the upper–right hand corner named Templates. Then, click the Typeset button and behold your creation!

Among the resources that I have found most helpful are: