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What Is L Tex?: Lingua Franca

Latex is a typesetting language and macro package based on TeX that is used to format scientific documents. It processes documents containing text and markup language, which controls formatting like fonts, sectioning, and paragraphing. A LaTeX file uses markup commands embedded within the text to indicate formatting and includes a preamble and environment to specify document properties and structure.

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45 views

What Is L Tex?: Lingua Franca

Latex is a typesetting language and macro package based on TeX that is used to format scientific documents. It processes documents containing text and markup language, which controls formatting like fonts, sectioning, and paragraphing. A LaTeX file uses markup commands embedded within the text to indicate formatting and includes a preamble and environment to specify document properties and structure.

Uploaded by

HappyEva
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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What is LATEX?

It is not a statistical computing package.

It is a typesetting language, the Lingua Franca


of the scientific world.

It is a macro package based on TEX.

TEX was created by Donald Knuth at Stanford University.

LATEX was created by Leslie Lamport of DEC


(Digital Equipment Corporation, VAX, PDP11) when it still existed.

LATEX processes documents with text and markup language.

1
What Is Markup Language?

Instead of 2 we write
Instead of $\alpha2$ we write

Instead of
2 + 2 = 2
we write
Instead of
\[
\alpha2+\beta2=\gamma2
\]
we write

Markups also control fonts (types and sizes), sectioning of documents,


and many other aspects of document writing.

2
Text Formatting

New paragraphs are indicated by an empty line. In the source file the
text does not have to be arranged for paragraphing purposes.

Here is the start of the next paragraph....

New paragraphs are {\it indicated}


by an empty line.
In the {\bf source file} the text does not have to
be arranged for \textcolor{red}{paragraphing} purposes.

Here is the start of the next paragraph....

Documents can be articles, books, presentation slides (see later).

We will not write books here.

3
To process a marked up LATEX file (ending with suffix .tex) you need
software, see LATEX processing software

You embed hyperlinks into your pdf document as shown above via
\usepackage{hyperref}
% in the preamble, followed in the document by
\href{http://www.ctan.org/starter.html}{%
\LaTeX~processing software}

To use textcolor{red}{paragraphing} on slide 3 you need


\usepackage{color}
% in the preamble

For questions on various LATEX issues see


http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX

Instead of further material on slides we will walk through some example


source files, as they are posted on the class web site.

4
The basic structure of a filename.tex file containing the text and
LATEX markup commands is as follows.

\documentclass[12pt]{article}%{book},{report} are other classes


% allows [10pt], {11pt] and [12pt]
% \documentclass[12pt]{extarticle} allows in addition
% [8pt], [9pt], [14pt], [17pt], and [20pt]
% the next 5 lines control page layout.
\setlength{\topmargin}{-1in}
\setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-.25in}
\setlength{\evensidemargin}{-.25in}
\setlength{\textwidth}{7in}
\setlength{\textheight}{9in}
\usepackage{graphicx} % enables graphics inclusion
\usepackage{hyperref} % enables inclusion of hyperlinks
%\pagestyle{empty} % without first % suppresses page numbering
\parindent=0in %controls paragraph indentation
\parskip=.1in % controls space between paragraphs

\begin{document}
Some text with markup language interspersed.
\end{document}
5

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