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157A, Fall Semester 2006 Brent Turner. Presentation Contents:. What Is LaTeX? History of LaTeX LaTeX Use Typesetting – HTML vs. LaTeX LaTeX Syntax Examples: document and formula References. What Is LaTeX?. TeX – typesetting standard A TeX based document format
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157A, Fall Semester 2006 Brent Turner
Presentation Contents: • What Is LaTeX? • History of LaTeX • LaTeX Use • Typesetting – HTML vs. LaTeX • LaTeX Syntax • Examples: document and formula • References
What Is LaTeX? • TeX – typesetting standard • A TeX based document format • Used for typesetting documents • Uses tags to request elements of a document from the TeX typesetter • Not WYSIWYG
TeX (the history of LaTeX) • Created by Donald E. Knuth in 1977 • Ideal for typesetting text and mathematical formulae • Mr. Knuth did not like the way publishers were formatting/typesetting his articles so he set up his own standard for authors • His website – www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth
History of LaTeX • LaTeX is pronounced “Lay-tech,” with a “k” sound, it is not pronounced “latex” as in rubber. • The “ch” originates from the Greek alphabet where X is the letter “ch” or “chi”. • tex is also the first syllable of the Greek word texnologia (technology).
History of LaTeX - cont • The LaTeX program is a macro package that allows authors to use TeX easily. It is similar to a simple programming language • It is very stable and can run on almost any computer
LaTeX Use • Download and install the free software. • Setup can be tricky, it is OS/machine dependant. • When using LaTeX, all document formatting is embedded within the text. • LaTeX uses control sequences (tags), which consist of a backslash (\) followed by a string of letters, possibly contained within { }, to indicate the format of the text. (see examples later)
LaTeX fundamentals An author writes a LaTeX input file in a text editor and then compiles this using LaTeX. An input file has literal text along with commands to process the text. There are some conceptual similarities to a markup language such as HTML. However, a fundamental difference is that LaTeX is designed as a page layout language, unlike HMTL which is functional markup. The whole point of LaTeX is to achieve perfect typographic output, which is not the purpose of HTML.
Syntax • Using LaTeX to produce a document: \documentclass \begin{document} (The text is typed here) … \end{document} • LaTeX will automatically indent and put it in paragraph form. • To not indent a paragraph, we can use the \noindent tag at the beginning of the paragraph. • See the documentation for a complete list of tags.
Mathematical Formula Example This example prints the definition of variance and standard deviation using LaTeX syntax.
Result: Trying to do this in MSWord, or other popular WYSIWYG editor = too much work!
References • http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~dwilkins/LaTeXPrimer • http://www.latex-project.org/ • John Eagle, Wen Gao; Spring 2006 cs157a • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX