Processing LaTeX with GNU/Linux systems

Suppose you have a file sample.tex written in LaTeX and you want to process it into a readable document on a GNU/Linux system.

To convert it into a DVI file go to a command line and move to the directory in which you saved the file. There run

latex sample.tex

Unless there is a problem you should now find a file called sample.dvi in the directory.

To convert this into a PS postscript file which you can then print run

dvips sample.dvi

To convert this into a PDF file run

ps2pdf sample.ps

To convert a LaTeX file sample.tex directly into a PDF file run

pdflatex sample.tex