This chapter is a draft. See the outline.

Getting started with MiKTeX

A guide to quickly starting with MiKTeX.

In this chapter:

Installing MiKTeX
Generate the book
Viewing the book

Installing MiKTeX

First we must install the MiKTeX base system. I am using here the chocolatey package manager.

choco install miktex -y

Note: you should follow the post installation instructions from the original web site: miktex-console

Generate the book

Then you can generate the PDF file from the generated tex file with the following command.

pdflatex .\Shakespeare.tex

You will see an output like the following example.

This is pdfTeX, Version 3.141592653-2.6-1.40.24 (MiKTeX 23.1) (preloaded format=pdflatex.fmt)
 restricted \write18 enabled.
entering extended mode
(Shakespeare.tex
LaTeX2e <2022-11-01> patch level 1
L3 programming layer <2023-03-30>
(C:\Users\Cord\AppData\Roaming\MiKTeX\tex/latex/
...
.pfb><C:/Users/Cord/AppData/Roaming/MiKTeX/fonts/type1/public/erewhon/Erewhon-R
egularSlanted.pfb>
Output written on Shakespeare.pdf (21 pages, 305827 bytes).
Transcript written on Shakespeare.log.

The book will be one PDF file you can view or print.

Note: When you run this the very first time you need internet access, because some additional packages will be downloaded. This might take also some time.

Viewing the book

There are two options to view the book. An PDF viewer like Acrobat or some modern browser or the texworks tool from the MiKTeX distribution. The big advantage is that the PDF is not locked and can be regenerated while the viewer is open. This allows a good streamlined workflow.

texworks .\Shakespeare.pdf