What you need:
- A computer to install the LaTeX on.
- A LaTeX editor. This is the piece of software you will use to write your LaTeX files and to generate a final PDF output.
- Somewhere to save all your files.
- Patience.
Installing LaTeX
LaTeX comes in several flavours – they all effectively do the same job. Some are specific to certain platforms (Windows/Mac/Linux/etc.).
MikTeX
I work on Windows and use MikTeX. To download this, go to http://miktex.org/. As of today, the latest stable version is MikTeX 2.7. Click on the link to this under ‘Downloads’ in the navigation bar. You will then find a page with simple installation instructions.
Useful links
- Installing LaTeX on a Mac – http://guides.macrumors.com/Installing_LaTeX_on_a_Mac
- General guide to installing LaTeX from CTAN (Comprehensive TeX Archive Network) – http://tug.ctan.org/starter.html
University of Cambridge PWF Machines
According to the Cambridge University Computing Service pages, LaTeX and TeX are installed on the Windows PWF machines. For details, see http://www.cam.ac.uk/cs/pwf/pclist.html.
The Engineering Dept. has a useful webpage about LaTeX: http://www.eng.cam.ac.uk/help/tpl/textprocessing/.
LaTeX for Humans 
Have you tried XeTeX at all? I’ve used it to write a short trial article which included some non-Latin alphabets. It’d be interesting to hear your experiences with it.
I haven’t tried XeTeX yet. My main preoccupation at the moment is learning how to use BibLaTeX, as I’ve given up hope of getting jurabib to produce citations in a particular style.
I just looked at the XeTeX examples on http://www.tug.org/xetex/ and it looks like it could be a much easier way of handling Arabic script compared to writing it out in Latin script in LaTeX. I will definitely look into this further.
Did you find it straightforward to use? And is there a manual on XeTeX? I wasn’t able to find one.
I was new to *Tex so the learning curve was steep, but for those already familiar with LaTeX, I’m sure the transition would be fairly easy. There’s a manual at .
For a humanities style bibliography, I’m using chicago-notes-df, which seems to do exactly what I want.
I also need Arabic support so I use a combination of XeTeX, Memoir, bidi and polyglossia. So far so good.
Seems I neglected to copy in the link for the XeTeX manual. Here it is: http://xml.web.cern.ch/XML/lgc2/xetexmain.pdf
And there’s also a short reference guide: http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/info/xetexref/XeTeX-reference.pdf