LaTeX is a powerful text processing and formatting tool that produces clean, consistent results once you get it set up. It is available for many platforms; it's free; you can use it with the editor of your choice; it handles mathematical and other symbols better than many other products; and style changes are neater. Generally, if Figure 1 is set up correctly, Figure 100 will be set up correctly.
The Georgia Tech Graduate Studies office does not have technical expertise in and cannot provide technical support for LaTeX. There are, however, many helpful web sites available, a few of which are provided here for your convenience:
Many students have also found useful tips for dealing with specific problems by entering keywords such as "LaTeX formatting table captions" in their favorite search engines.
Most Common LaTeX to PDF Problem
The most common problem we see with ETDs created in LaTeX is altering of the page size, particularly an increase of the bottom margin to more than one inch, and sometimes an accompanying decrease in the top and/or right margins to less than the requisite one inch. Less frequently, there will also be problems with figures disappearing or changing appearance. The sizing error may be introduced inadvertently during the conversion from .dvi to .pdf or .ps when the program doing the converting defaults to the A4 European page size. Always check your pdf file after conversion, even if your source file looked perfect.
The following fixes have been found by your fellow GIT graduate students and passed along to the Graduate Thesis Office. We hope they help you:
First, before converting the .tex file to .dvi, make sure the class header file in your .tex file says something like "\documentclass[12pt, letter]{article}".
If you are converting the resulting .dvi file to a .ps file, be sure the dvips options specify "-P pdf -t letter".
When you are converting to .pdf from either the .dvi file directly or from a .ps file, locate the C:\texmf\dvipdfm\config\config\ or analogous folder for pdf's in your System. Replace the line "p a4" with "p letter".
