PCC/ CCOG / MTH

Course Content and Outcome Guide for MTH 84

Date:
03-JAN-2012
Posted by:
Scot Leavitt
Course Number:
MTH 84
Course Title:
Introduction to LaTeX
Credit Hours:
1
Lecture hours:
10
Lecture/Lab hours:
0
Lab hours:
0
Special Fee:
 

Course Description

Explores the power of LaTeX for use at school or home for mathematical documents and other applications. Prerequisite: WR 115, RD 115, and MTH 20 or equivalent placement test scores.

Intended Outcomes for the course

 

Upon successful completion of the class a student will be able to:

• successfully install LaTeX and its related components on a home/personal computer

• use a familiarity with LaTeX and various templates acquired from the course to compose Mathematical documents, presentations, reports

• access various resources, such as http://ctan.org, to obtain additional LaTeX packages.

Course Activities and Design

Assessment must include:

  • attend 80% or more of class meetings for pass consideration

At least one of the following:

  • weekly document assignments
  • portfolio of templates
  • in class group work
  • cumulative assignment
  • level specific assignment (e.g lab write up for MTH 251)

Course Content (Themes, Concepts, Issues and Skills)

  1. Set up and compiling options
    • installing LaTeX, ghostscript, ghostview, and an IDE
    • pdflatex
       
  2. Simple documents
    • simple equations
    • abeling and referencing equations
    • titles, authors, page numbers
    • font sizes and styles, page sizes, line spacing (using geometry package)
    • itemize, enumerate, \bf, \em, fancyhdr
    • hyperlinks in pdf files (using hyperref package)
    • interpreting .log files
    • fixing mistakes
       
  3. More advanced features
    • advanced equations and equation arrays
    • new commands
    • new environments, counters, theorems
    • align equations left/right, change spaces between equations in equation array (\jot)
    • color package
    • installing new packages (using mktexlsr for example)
       
  4. Figures and tables
    • including pictures and figures (.bmp, .jpg, .eps, etc)
    • tables
    • subfigure, subtable, longtable
    • captions (using caption package to change to small, hanging, bold, italic, etc)
    • rotatebox
    • minipages, multicols
       
  5. Advanced documents (such as projects, thesis)
    • sections, sub sections
    • table of contents (toc), list of figures (log), list of tables (lot)
    • refcheck (using refcheck package)
    • beamer class for presentations
       
  6. Optional content
    • latex2html
    • batch/bash files
    • bibliography (using bibtex)
    • index (using makeindex)
    • xypic
    • pstricks