The suite of tools

Several different programs are required to make effective use of L^ATEX.

• Editor: vi, emacs, xemacs, kile or your favorite ordinary words-in-a-row editor. (Warning: don't let your lines get thousands of characters long--put in a carriage return every so often.) The editor I'm using right now is smart enough to highlight each L^ATEX-specific command in different colors.
• The TEX processor: tex filename.tex or latex filename.tex or pdflatex filename.tex
• The DVI previewer: xdvi filename.dvi or kdvi filename.dvi
• The PDF Viewer: gv filename.pdf or acroread filename.pdf or xpdf filename.pdf
• The Postscript generator: dvips filename.dvi immediately prints the file;
  dvips -f filename.dvi > filename.ps will create a postscript file. There are other lots of other dvi** conversion programs that may be useful in special circumstances, but dvips is by far the most useful.
• PostScript Viewers: gv filename.ps or kghostview filename.ps
• PostScript to PDF converters: pstill or convert or ps2pdf

Command-line junkies who wish to spell-check their L^ATEX documents may do so via

ispell mydoc.tex

(using the space bar to advance through the document), since the ispell utility is quite L^ATEX-aware.