By Tobias Oetiker, Hubert Partl, Irene Hyna and Elisabeth Schlegl
LATEX is a typesetting system that is very suitable for producing scientific and mathematical documents of high typographical quality. It is also suitable for producing all sorts of other documents, from simple letters to complete books. LATEX uses TEX [2] as its formatting engine. This short introduction describes LATEX2" and should be sufficient for most applications of LATEX.
This introduction is split into 6 chapters:
Chapter 1 tells you about the basic structure of LATEX2" documents. You will also learn a bit about the history of LATEX. After reading this chapter, you should have a rough understanding how LATEX works. Chapter 2 goes into the details of typesetting your documents. It explains most of the essential LATEX commands and environments. After reading this chapter, you will be able to write your first documents.
Chapter 3 explains how to typeset formulae with LATEX. Many examples demonstrate how to use one of LATEX’s main strengths. At the end of the chapter are tables listing all mathematical symbols available in LATEX.
Chapter 4 explains indexes, bibliography generation and inclusion of EPS graphics. It introduces creation of PDF documents with pdfLATEX and presents some handy extension packages.
Chapter 5 shows how to use LATEX for creating graphics. Instead of drawing a picture with some graphics program, saving it to a file and then including it into LATEX you describe the picture and have LATEX draw it for you.
Chapter 6 contains some potentially dangerous information about how to alter the standard document layout produced by LATEX. It will tell you how to change things such that the beautiful output of LATEX turns ugly or stunning, depending on your abilities.
It is important to read the chapters in order—the book is not that big, after all. Be sure to carefully read the examples, because a lot of the information is in the examples placed throughout the book.
LATEX is available for most computers, from the PC and Mac to large UNIX and VMS systems. On many university computer clusters you will find that a LATEX installation is available, ready to use. Information on how to access the local LATEX installation should be provided in the Local Guide [5]. If you have problems getting started, ask the person who gave you this booklet.
The scope of this document is not to tell you how to install and set up a LATEX system, but to teach you how to write your documents so that they can be processed by LATEX.
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