Using TeX on the DCI Systems

TeX is no longer installed on outlier or pccs, but rather on the new RAID storage device (named "savah") and exported to the rest of the DCI systems. In order to use it, you will need to make sure that your $PATH includes the proper directory, such as /common/TeX/bin/sparc-solaris2.7 when logging in to Solaris machines, or /common/TeX/bin/i386-linux when logging in to Linux machines.

I have written small shell scripts to figure this out for you, so all you need to do is the following:

Find out what shell you're using by typing:
echo $SHELL
If you are using csh or tcsh, add the following line to your .cshrc or .login (both located in your home directory):
test -r /common/sys/cshrc/tex.csh && source /common/sys/cshrc/tex.csh

Or, if you are using bash or sh, add the following line to your .bashrc or .profile:
[ -f /common/sys/shrc/tex.sh ] && . /common/sys/shrc/tex.sh
In order for the changes to take effect, you must log out or type:
source .cshrc (or source .login or source .profile or source .bashrc).

Creating and Compiling your TeX source

You may now begin creating and compiling files in TeX. There are several TeX and LaTeX tutorials available on the web, including the following:

A Gentle Introduction to Tex (with sample LaTeX files), by Laura Taalman and Michael Kozdron
A beginner's introduction to typesetting with LaTeX, by Peter Flynn
The (Not So) Short Introduction to LaTeX2e, by Oetiker, Partl, Hyna, and Schlegl

Once you have created a TeX source file, compile it by typing:
pdftex yourfile.tex (to generate a pdf file)
tex yourfile.tex (to generate a dvi file)

Or for LaTeX:
pdflatex yourfile.tex (to generate a pdf file)
latex yourfile.tex (to generate a dvi file)

There are several available utilities for converting between file formats, including dvips (dvi to ps), ps2pdf (ps to pdf), pdf2ps (pdf to ps), and htlatex (tex to html).

Read about other ways to use TeX at Pomona.

Last updated Sep. 12, 2003.