A Quick Guide to Running Latex under Windows
Dan Fitton

Download and install Miktex : Download the setup program use it to download a 'complete' install, then re-run the setup program and install latex.

A nice Windows Latex editor is TeXnicCenter which is good to start off with, but I found Emacs much nicer: It has good Latex (and Bibtex) support and the spelling stuff is easy.

A great place to start for Latex is the Not So Short Guide, or maybe even better is looking at a Tex doccument someone has already done (maybe even refcard mentioned below), it is really easy to pick up. There are plenty of sites which explain the Bibtext entry types and what the fields are for, such as this one.

A site I've found pretty useful is here, it provides a goof reference on both Latex commands and Bibtex, and another here.

Emacs under Win32

1. Download Emacs here (or search for a set of more up-to-date binaries, or build it) and install it.
2. Copy ispell.el (Adds spell checking support via ISpell or ASpell) and contex.el (Imporves tex-mode support on Win32) into your emacs/site-lisp directory.
3. Install ASspell and the English langauage pack and add your ASpell 'bin' directory to you path (and the directory with you Acrobat.exe int it); I had to restart my machine for the path changes to be recognised in Emacs.
4. I also updated Flyspell, just stick this file in emacs/lisp/textmodes, deleting all other files starting with 'flyspell.'.

A quick command reference I've put togther is here, though you wil find a more complete one in the etc directory under emacs called refcard (.tex, .dvi)

For Bibtex there is a nice little script I found here which will lay out all the relevant fields for Bibtext entires if you do Alt-x <entry type> (e.g. Alt-x inproceedings), just copy gnu-bibtex.el to emacs/site-lisp and add:

(setq header-user-name "Your Name")
(require 'gnu-bibtex)

to your .emacs file.

Colour schemes can make Emacs look much prettier, grab the color-theme package from here and stick it in you site-lisp directory, then add something like:

(require 'color-theme)
(color-theme-matrix)

to your .emacs file. You can preview the colour themes here.

I good starting point for a simple emacs configuration is probably this .emacs file (just stick it in the root of c:\ or wherever your home directory is):

Configues ispell to use ASpell and sets the ditionary to British English:
(setq ispell-program-name "aspell")
(ispell-change-dictionary "british" t)

Loads ISpell automatically for various file formats:
(add-hook `text-mode-hook `flyspell-mode)
(add-hook `latex-mode-hook `flyspell-mode)
(add-hook `tex-mode-hook `flyspell-mode)
(add-hook `bibtex-mode-hook `flyspell-mode)

Turns on highlighting:
(global-font-lock-mode t)
(setq font-lock-maximum-decoration t)

Changes the latex/tex settings to use PDF/Acrobat instead of DVI format:
(setq latex-run-command "pdflatex")
(load "context")
(setq tex-default-mode 'context-mode)
(setq tex-output-extension ".pdf")
(setq tex-dvi-view-command "start \"acrobat\" *"

Another site similar to this one is here.