This tutorial will walk you through the process of using easylatex.

Please let us know if any part of this tutorial is confusing or incomplete. You can get support for EasyLatex via the mailing list easylatex-devel@lists.sourceforge.net 

Most of the tutorial is for Unix-like systems. In theory, easylatex might run under Windows, but it's never been tested.

0. Pre-requisites
Before you even install easylatex, you need to have the program "Perl" installed. You also have to have LaTeX installed, and also some standard modules that probably came with it (amsmath, amsfonts, amssymb, and psfrag).

You don't need anything else if you will be running EasyLatex from the directory it comes in (in that case, skip to step 1); but if you plan to move to to another directory (say, /usr/local/bin), you'll need to install the Perl module "Getopt::Declare" installed.

For instructions on installing that Perl module, see the web page http://easylatex.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?PerlModuleInstallationTutorial . Remember, you don't need to do this if you will be running EasyLatex from the directory it comes in.

If you want to use the graph functionality, you must also have GraphViz preinstalled.

1. Downloading EasyLatex
Follow [this link], and download the latest version of the "easylatex" package.

2. Installing EasyLatex
First, unzip EasyLatex.

tar -xovzf easylatex.tar.zip

Next, go into the directory that you just unpacked:

cd easylatex

Now, run: 

./quickInstall.pl  

That's it! EasyLatex should now be installed.

You might want to put the file "easylatex.pl" in your $PATH, or put it in some location like /usr/bin, so that you can run it from anywhere.

3. Writing an EasyLatex source file

For now, you can just look at the file "demo.txt" which comes with EasyLatex. A look at that file will show you some of the things that you can do with EasyLatex.

4. Compiling the easylatex file to postscript
Now, execute the file easylatex.pl like this:

./easylatex.pl -ps demo.txt

That's all; now you should have a file called demo.ps in your directory. You can view it with

gv demo.ps


If you DIDN'T install GraphViz, then trying to compile "demo.txt" will cause an error message (because that file tries to use the graph functionality). In this case, use the file "demo-no-graph.txt" instead, which should work:

./easylatex.pl -ps demo-no-graph.txt
gv demo-no-graph.ps