Hypertext Help with LaTeX

Downloading the Complete Help Files

If you find Hypertext Help with LaTeX to be useful, you are welcome to obtain the complete set of files and install them on your own machine. Retrieval and installation instructions are given below. They may be installed for use either with a webserver, which will ease network traffic and probably give you faster access, or they may be installed as local files which may be "read" with an HTML viewer, such as Lynx, Netscape, Internet Explorer, Opera, etc. without the necessity of a network connection.

To facilitate off-network usage, the files generally have only local (within the same directory) hypertext links. All links to "external" URLs, including much LaTeX information available on the Web, have been restricted to one file in this set other than the current one.

Although it is not required, if you make these files available on a public webserver, please send a note to webmaster@giss.nasa.gov if you would like it to be including among the mirror sites.


The files are available via anonymous ftp as a gzipped tar-red archive (about 80 kb). Your web browser can download the archive, after which you can use any one of many shareware compression programs to extract all the files within. We've found recent versions of StuffIt Expander useful in this regard.

Alternatively, for those of you logged into a Unix shell acount, you can retrieve the archive by anonymous ftp to ftp.giss.nasa.gov. Login as anonymous and give your e-mail address as the password, then switch to binary mode and download the file by issuing the commands:

  bin
  cd pub/sgreen/latex
  get latex.tar.gz

After downloading the file on your local machine, issue the Unix commands:

   gunzip latex.tar.gz
   tar -xf latex.tar

This will create a subdirectory named latex in your current directory which contains the complete set of html files and which requires about 1 MByte of disk space.

(Note: some web browsers will automatically gunzip the file after retrieval, but you will still need to manually extract files from the archive.)

You may rename or move the entire latex subdirectory as desired; all file references are local to the directory so links should continue to work. The "Introduction" file is index.html and the Table of Contents page is ltx-2.html.



Page revised: 2000-04-26, rbs