Preface

L^ATEX [1] 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. L^ATEX uses TEX [2] as its formatting engine.

This short introduction describes L^ATEX2_e and should be sufficient for most applications of L^ATEX. Refer to [1,3] for a complete description of the L^ATEX system.

This introduction is split into 6 chapters:

Chapter 1

tells you about the basic structure of L^ATEX2_e documents. You will also learn a bit about the history of L^ATEX. After reading this chapter, you should have a rough understanding how L^ATEX works.

Chapter 2

goes into the details of typesetting your documents. It explains most of the essential L^ATEX commands and environments. After reading this chapter, you will be able to write your first documents.

Chapter 3

explains how to typeset formulae with L^ATEX. Many examples demonstrate how to use one of L^ATEX's main strengths. At the end of the chapter are tables listing all mathematical symbols available in L^ATEX.

Chapter 4

explains indexes, bibliography generation and inclusion of EPS graphics. It introduces creation of PDF documents with pdfL^ATEX and presents some handy extension packages.

Chapter 5

shows how to use L^ATEX for creating graphics. Instead of drawing a picture with some graphics program, saving it to a file and then including it into L^ATEX you describe the picture and have L^ATEX draw it for you.

Chapter 6

contains some potentially dangerous information about how to alter the standard document layout produced by L^ATEX. It will tell you how to change things such that the beautiful output of L^ATEX 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.

L^ATEX 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 L^ATEX installation is available, ready to use. Information on how to access the local L^ATEX installation should be provided in the . 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 L^ATEX system, but to teach you how to write your documents so that they can be processed by L^ATEX.

If you need to get hold of any L^ATEX related material, have a look at one of the Comprehensive TEX Archive Network (CTAN) sites. The homepage is at http://www.ctan.org. All packages can also be retrieved from the ftp archive ftp://www.ctan.org and its mirror sites all over the world.

You will find other references to CTAN throughout the book, especially pointers to software and documents you might want to download. Instead of writing down complete urls, I just wrote CTAN: followed by whatever location within the CTAN tree you should go to.

If you want to run L^ATEX on your own computer, take a look at what is available from |systems|.

If you have ideas for something to be added, removed or altered in this document, please let me know. I am especially interested in feedback from L^ATEX novices about which bits of this intro are easy to understand and which could be explained better.

Tobias Oetikeroetiker@ee.ethz.chDepartment of Information Technology and
Electrical Engineering,
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology

The current version of this document is available on
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