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The TeX Catalogue by Graham Williams

Topic Index by Jürgen Fenn

Last modified: 1 August 2005

 

This part of the TeX Catalogue eventually will list all packages available from the "Comprehensive TeX Archive Network", or CTAN, for using plain TeX, LaTeX, ConTeXt, and Omega by topic. We also try to give some advice that might help you in getting software and guides not available on CTAN.

New packages on CTAN and package updates are announced on the tex-announce list which is also available as a blog and rss feed.

Every systematical order is arbitrary in some way or another. This is why entries may appear in more than one place. The following order generally tries to keep to that of the "The LaTeX Companion", 1st ed., by Goosens, Mittelbach, and Samarin.

This is very much a work in progress, so suggestions to the maintainer are quite welcome.

Contents

 

 References and Manuals

You should refer to "lshort" for the basic rules for writing correct LaTeX2e.
On the other hand, the most common mistakes in using LaTeX2e and how to avoid them are listed in Mark Trettin's guide "l2tabu" available in German, English, French, and Italian.

Below are some TeX resources online mostly outside CTAN that deserve to be mentioned, too:

A comprehensive commented reference of the commands available both in LaTeX and the most popular packages can be found at Michael Wiedmann's tex-refs project.

Herbert Voß has gathered together a rather comprehensive collection of Tips & Tricks on (La)TeX.

There also is Norman Walsh's help for Plain TeX, LaTeX, BibTeX, MakeIndex, and SliTeX.

Tutorials on TeX by TUG India are available online, or as PDF. There also is Peter Flynn's Beginner's Introduction available both online and for download.

For news on the development of LaTeX see the LaTeX3 Project.
The ConTeXt project, too, has a homepage of its own.

For practical hints on how to use LaTeX in general as well as on particular packages refer to the "Frequently Asked Questions" lists of local TeX User Groups available on the WWW in Czech / Slowak, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Polish, Spanish, or on CTAN:

 Frequently asked questions:

 Introduction to LaTeX "lshort":

 Usage Guide "l2tabu":

 Some more guides to (La)TeX:

  Fonts and Graphics:

 Mathematics:

 (La)TeX on Windows:

There are two guides for installing LaTeX on Windows in German in the first place: Both Joachim Schlosser, and Viktor Witting, Maik Scherer, Florian Hibler, Johannes Schubert, Mathias Wasserthal, and Andreas Hirsch provide rather good guides to installing a complete MiKTeX system on Windows.

 Developing (La)TeX Packages:

 (La)TeX on the Web:

 (La)TeX vs. Word Processors:

LyX is an advanced alternative to word processors which is based on LaTeX.

You may also input text using OpenOffice Writer and later convert it to LaTeX, or HTML with Henrik Just's Java-based Writer2LaTeX.

The TUG offers an overview of converters from PC Textprocessors to LaTeX and vice versa. Some of the converters between LaTeX and word processor formats can be found on CTAN.

 The Symbols available in (La)TeX:

 Typesetting Tables:

 Managing Bibliographies:

 TUGboat:

 Typography:

 Tips for using fancyhdr:

 Tips for using Floats:

 Components of TeX:

 The TeX Directory Structure documentation:

 Donald E. Knuth's Own Documentation of TeX and Metafont:

 

 Alternative Document Classes

These class files provide an alternative to the usual LaTeX article, report, or book classes. They are used to change document layout in general and they usually provide some special features, as well. You should check the class file documentation first to make sure whether you can use options or commands that are part of the respective class file before considering the use of one of the packages listed below in alphabetical order.

There are some alternatives to letter.cls, too, for writing letters and faxes.

There are also classes for typesetting theses and papers for scientific journals. Some more classes which also might be of interest to general users of TeX are listed under Science.

 KOMA-Script:

 HC:

 Memoir:

 NTG Class:

 Octavo:

 Refman:

 

 Document Structure

 Document and Section Titles:

 Abstract:

 Table of Contents:

 Changing the Counting of Chapters:

 Crossreferences:

 Footnotes and Endnotes:

There are some packages for working on critical editions for those interested in the Humanities.

 Appendix:

 

 Formatting

 Enumerating and Listing Items:

 Verbatim Input and Quoting:

 Underlining, Letterspacing etc.:

 Raggedright and Raggedleft Typesetting

 Formatting Paragraphs

 

 Page Layout

 Page Margins:

 Page Headings:

 Landscape Format:

 

 Page Numbers

 

 Manipulating Counters

 

 Line and Paragraph Numbers

There are packages for working on critical editions.

 

 Columns in a Page

 

 Tables

See also packages for floats.
There are guides to typesetting tables.
There is Calc2LaTeX for converting OpenOffice spreadsheets to LaTeX tables.

 Typesetting Long Tables:

 Formatting Decimal Columns:

 Adding some Colour to Tables:

There are packages for colour and shading in general.

 Misc:

 

 Floats

See also the packages for including graphics and tables.

 

 Creating Indices and Glossaries

 

 Bibliography

For showing \cite and \bibitem crossreferences use the drftcite package.

 BibTeX:

 Multilingual Bibliographies:

 Multiple Bibliographies in a document:

 Some more additional Packages:

 Bibliography Styles:

For using bibtex for working in the humanities see the bibliography section there.

 Tools for managing your Bibliography:

 

 Fonts

See also PostScript Support, and Creating PDF Documents.
PostScript Type 1, and Type 3 Fonts are listed in this section.
There are guides on using different types of fonts.

 Computer Modern Fonts:

 Extended Computer Fonts:

 Text Companion Fonts:

 The Concrete Fonts:

 CM-super Fonts:

 Latin Modern Fonts:

 The Bera Fonts

 AMS Fonts for Mathematical Typesetting:

 PostScript Type1 Fonts:

 PostScript Type3 Fonts:

 TrueType Fonts:

 Metafont and MetaPost:

 Symbol Fonts:

The PostScript symbol fonts Zapf Dingbats are supported by the pifont package which is part of psnfss.

 The "Euro" Currency Symbol €:

 Typesetting Barcode:

 Typesetting Initials:

 Historic Fonts:

 Antiquity and Early Ages:

 Gothic Fonts:

 Bookhand Fonts:

 Runes:

 Typesetting Handwriting:

 Installing Fonts:

 Misc:

 

 PostScript Support

PostScript Type 1, and Type 3 fonts are listed in the Fonts section.

 dvips:

 psnfss:

The psnfss packages mathppl, mathptm, palatino, utopia and times are obsolete and hence should not be used any more.

 PS-Tricks:

PS-Tricks has its own homepage.
There are more packages for drawing curcuit diagrams and for working in the field of electronics.

 Misc:

 

 Creating PDF Documents

 PDFTeX:

 Packages for Special PDF Features:

 Fonts for PDF Files:

 PDF Viewers and Tools:

 

 Combining Documents

For linking documents by crossreferences use xr.
See also Managing large Documents.

 

 Bundling all Packages necessary for compiling a Document

 

 Managing different versions of your document

See also Combining Documents, and Managing large documents.

 

 Managing large Documents

See also Combining Documents, and Managing different versions of your document.

 

 Multilingual Support

Try the parallel package for typesetting bilingual versions of a text side by side in two columns. parrun may be useful for typesetting two streams of text running parallel one above the other.
There are packages for typesetting critical editions too.
You may also typeset two-language dictionaries using LaTeX2e.

Omega is intended for multilingual typesetting, supporting unicode and bi-directional typesetting.

 Misc:

The babel Package:

 Multilingual Bibliographies:

 Arabic:

 Armenian:

 Basque:

 Bangla and Asamese:

 Bengali:

 Burmese:

 Casyl:

 Cherokee:

 Chinese, Japanese, Korean:

For information on Chinese TeX see the CTeX homepage.

 Coptic:

 Croatian:

 Cyrillic:

 Czech and Slovene:

 Devangari:

 Dutch:

 English

 Epi-Olmec:

 Ethiopian:

 French:

 German:

 Greek:

For typesetting ancient Greek use the babel package with the option polutonikogreek.

See "Humanities" for more references on the Humanities.

 Gurmukhi:

 Hebrew:

 Hungarian:

 Icelandic:

 Indian:

 Inuktitut:

 Italian:

 Japanese:

See also CJK.

 Korean:

See also CJK.

 Latin:

 Malayam:

 Manju:

 Mongolian:

 Polish:

 Portuguese:

 Romanian:

 Russian:

See packages for typesetting Cyrillic encodings, and fonts.

 Sanskrit:

 Sinhala:

 Slovene:

 Somali:

 Spanish:

 Swedish:

 Tamil:

 Telugu:

 Tibetan:

 Turkish:

 Ukrainian:

A converter from cyrillic letters to ASCII is ascii-cyrillic
See also packages for cyrillic encodings, and fonts.

 Vietnamese:

 Misc:

 

 "Office" Applications

 Writing Letters, Faxes, Memos, and Newsletters:

The koma-script bundle provides a letter class of its own called scrlttr2.
There are also packages for producing labels and for addressing envelopes.

 Meeting protocols:

 Keeping Lists of Addresses and Mass-Mailing:

The koma-script bundle provides scraddr that goes with the scrlttr2 letter class for using address data in letters.

 Calendars, Date and Time:

 Money Currency:

There are some packges for making the Euro currency symbol (€) work in LaTeX.

 

 Writing Applications for a Job / CV:

There are no packages for writing an application as a whole. So try to combine one of the following packages for CVs with a package for letters that suits your needs.

 Business Cards, Labels and Envelopes:

 Leaflets:

 Writing Invoices:

 Presentation Slides:

Harald Wiedmann provides a comprehensive overview of tools for making screen presentations, most of them working with LaTeX.

 Spreadsheets:

There is Calc2LaTeX for converting OpenOffice spreadsheets to LaTeX tables.

 

 Databases

 

 Science

Note: There are some more packages for working on your bibliography. Packages specific to one subject are listed both there and below.

 Typesetting Theses and Papers for Journals:

Note: There are more alternatice document classes you may use for scientific work as well.

 Typesetting Laboratory Journals:

 Typesetting Physical Units:

 Mathematics:

Thanks to Morten Høgholm for advice on this section.

For typesetting arrays see also the packages for tables, and for formatting decimal columns.

There are some guides on using LaTeX for Mathematics.

 Calculating:

 AMS-LaTeX:

 Support for AMS-LaTeX:

 The easy Family of Packages:

 Other Math Macros:

 Math Fonts:

PostScript math fonts are supported by both the mathpazo package for Palatino, and the mathptmx package for Times which are part of the psnfss package. See the psnfss section for details.

 Math Graphics:

 Statistics:

 Physics:

 Astronomy:

 Aeronautics:

 Chemistry:

 Biology:

 Geophysics:

 Electronics:

For drawing circuit diagrams see also the PS-Tricks package.

 Computer Science:

 Humanities:

For typesetting ancient Greek use the babel package with the option polutonikogreek.
For typesetting Latin you may also use the babel package with the option latin.
There are packages for typesetting Poetry and Drama.

 Bibliography:

See also the general section on bibliographies.

 Critical Editions:

There are some packages for working on footnotes and endnotes as well as for numbering lines and paragraphs, and multilingual support.
A summary of the edmac package in comparison to ednotes, and ledmac as well as links to additional software helping in writing critical editions can be found on Dominik Wujastik's homepage.

 Typesetting Dictionaries:

 Misc:

 Psychology:

 Law:

 Economics:

 Phonetics:

 Linguistics:

 

 Including Graphics

See also the packages for including floats, and for adding colour and shading.
We also list guides on including graphics.

 

 Drawing Graph Paper and Grids

 

 Drawing Diagrams and Charts

 Arrow Theoretic Diagrams

 Barcharts

 Bezier Curves

 Bridge Diagrams

 Drawing Circles

 Clocks

 Commutative Diagrams

 Computer Keyboards

 Electric Circuit Diagrams

See also the electronics section and the PS-Tricks package.

 Feynman Diagrams

 Histograms

 Karnaugh-Maps, and Veitch-Charts

 Logic Diagrams

 Nassi-Schneidermann Diagrams

 Pictex

 Postscript Macros for Drawing

 Syntax Diagrams

 Timing Diagrams

 Vector Arrows

 Tools

 Misc

 

 Adding some Colour and Shading

There are more packages for adding some colour to tables.

 

 Typesetting Exam Scripts, Quizzes, and Questionnaires

 

 Music

 

 Poetry and Drama

There are some more packages for those interested in the Humanities, including work on critical editions.

 

 Cooking Recipes

 

 Documenting Games

 

 Crossword Puzzles

 

 CD and MC Covers

 

 Support for the Blind

 

 Using different character sets

 

 Developing and Documenting LaTeX Packages

 

 (La)TeX Distributions

texlive provides tetex for Unices (including Mac OS X) and fptex for Windows.

 Unices:

 DOS:

 OS/2:

 Windows:

 Macintosh:

Gary L. Gray and Joseph C. Slater have compiled a comprehensive site for the Macintosh TeX community.

 Misc:

 

 E-TeX

 ConTeXt

ConTeXt is another macro package for using TeX, so it supplies an alternative to LaTeX. The ConTeXt project has a rather lively mailing list.
For those speaking German there is a comprehensive paper by Günter Partosch summarising his talk on ConTeXt vs. LaTeX held at a Dante meeting in 2003.

 

 Omega

 

 Editors

See also LyX.

 

 LyX

 

MicroIMP

 

 Previewers and Plugins

 

 Spelling Checker

 

 Converters

 TeX, and Word Processors:

You may now input text using OpenOffice Writer and later convert it to LaTeX with Java-based Writer2LaTeX.

If you are using LyX there are two converters coming with LyX for importing LaTeX files: reLyX (a perl script), and tex2lyx (still experimental).

The TUG offers an overview of converters from PC Textprocessors to LaTeX and vice versa From LaTeX to PC. Some of the converters between LaTeX and word processor formats can be found on CTAN:

 TeX to HTML:

 HTML to TeX:

 Font Formats:

 Misc:

There is Calc2LaTeX for converting OpenOffice spreadsheets to LaTeX tables.

 

 Using Perl with LaTeX

 

 Using SGML and XML with LaTeX

 

 Some more binaries

 

 Miscellanous Packages