UNIX Writing Tools Primer for CS Graduate Students : Ispell , L A TEX

As graduate students in computer science at Ohio University, you will be expected to write reports for classes, conference papers, journal papers, theses or dissertations. It is expected that such documents will be well written and carefully prepared. Writing well is a difficult task, even for those of us with many years of experience. It can be even more difficult to prepare professional looking documents because technical writing in computer science (and other disciplines) often involves extensive references, complicated technical diagrams, and complicated formulae. Fortunately, there are a number of relatively standard (and free!) software tools that can help produce professional looking documents. In this primer, a brief introduction is given to each of these software tools. While some of these tools can be used in a stand alone fashion, this document is primarily concerned with the use of these tools for the creation of professionally prepared reports. Because writing well is difficult, you may want to invest in a good dictionary and other books about writing before you start. There are many excellent books on writing, grammar, and how to avoid common mistakes. My favorites are Nicholas Higham’s Handbook of Writing for the Mathematical Sciences [3] and Brusaw et al. Handbook of Technical Writing [1]. You may also wish to use some of the classics, such Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style [4]. In addition, there are a number of expository articles about writing that you may want to read. A somewhat recent article by Hemaspaandra and Selman [2] provides excellent advice on writing and producing large technical documents. Their article provides a number of additional references on writing that may be useful to some of you. This document is a primer on six common software tools for producing technical documents: ispell, LTEX, bibtex, xfig, gnuplot, and xv. All of these tools are relatively complex, and hence this primer cannot possibly cover all the many ways of using them. For additional help, you will almost certainly want to purchase a user’s guide, such as the classic book LTEX: A Documentation Preparation System User’s Guide and Reference Manual by Leslie Lamport [5].