A beginner's introduction to typesetting with
LATEX
Foreword
Peter Flynn
Silmaril Consultants
Textual Therapy Division
v. 3.6 (March 2005)
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- Introduction
- Foreword
- Preface
- Installing TEX and LATEX
- Using your editor to create documents
- Basic document structures
- Typesetting, viewing and printing
- CTAN, packages, and online help
- Other document structures
- Textual tools
- Fonts and layouts
- Programmability (macros)
- Compatibility with other systems
- Configuring TEX search paths
- TEX Users Group membership
- The ASCII character set
- GNU Free Documentation License
- References
- Index
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This edition of Formatting
Information was prompted by the generous help I
have received from TEX users too numerous to mention
individually. Shortly after TUGboat published the November
2003 edition, I was reminded by a spate of email of the
fragility of documentation for a system like LATEX which is
constantly under development. There have been revisions to
packages; issues of new distributions, new tools, and new
interfaces; new books and other new documents; corrections to
my own errors; suggestions for rewording; and in one or two
cases mild abuse for having omitted package X which the author
felt to be indispensable to users. ¶ I am grateful as always to the people who sent me
corrections and suggestions for improvement. Please keep them
coming: only this way can this book reflect what people
want to learn. The same limitation still applies, however: no
mathematics, as there are already a dozen or more excellent
books on the market — as well as other online
documents — dealing with mathematical typesetting in
TEX and LATEX in finer and better detail than I am
capable of. ¶ The structure remains the same, but I have revised and
rephrased a lot of material, especially in the earlier
chapters where a new user cannot be expected yet to have
acquired any depth of knowledge. Many of the screenshots have
been updated, and most of the examples and code fragments have
been retested. ¶ As I was finishing this edition, I was asked to review
an article for The PracTEX Journal, which
grew out of the Practical TEX Conference in 2004. The
author specifically took the writers of documentation to task
for failing to explain things more clearly, and as I read
more, I found myself agreeing, and resolving to clear up some
specific problems areas as far as possible. It is very
difficult for people who write technical documentation to
remember how they struggled to learn what has now become a
familiar system. So much of what we do is second nature, and a
lot of it actually has nothing to do with the software, but
more with the way in which we view and approach information,
and the general level of knowledge of computing. If I have
obscured something by making unreasonable assumptions about
your knowledge, please let me know so
that I can correct it.
Peter Flynn is author of The HTML Handbook and Understanding SGML and XML Tools, and editor of The XML FAQ.
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This document is Copyright © 1999–2005 by
Silmaril Consultants under the terms of what is now the GNU
Free Documentation License (copyleft).
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify
this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation
License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the
Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no
Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the
license is included in the section entitled The GNU Free Documentation License.
You are allowed to distribute, reproduce, and modify it
without fee or further requirement for consent subject to the
conditions in section D.5. The author has
asserted his right to be identified as the author of this
document. If you make useful modifications you are asked to
inform the author so that the master copy can be updated. See
the full text of the License in Appendix D.
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As noted in this Introduction,
this document accompanies a two-day introductory training course.
It became obvious from repeated questions in class and
afterwards, as well as from general queries on comp.text.tex that many people do
not read the FAQs, do not use the
TUG web site, do not buy the books and
manuals, do not use the newsgroups and mailing lists, and do not
download the free documentation. Instead, they try to get by
using the training technique known as ‘sitting by
Nelly’, which involves looking over a
colleague's shoulder in the office, lab, library, pub, or
classroom, and absorbing all his or her bad habits.
In the summer of 2001 I presented a short proposal on the
marketing of LATEX to the annual conference of the TEX Users
Group held at the University of Delaware, and showed an example
of a draft
brochure designed to persuade newcomers to try LATEX
for their typesetting requirements. As a result of questions and
suggestions, it was obvious that it needed to include a pointer
to some documentation, and I agreed to make available a revised
form of this document, expanded to be used outside the
classroom, and to include those topics on which I have had most
questions from users over the years.
It turned out to mean a significant
reworking of a lot of the material. Some of it appears in almost
every other manual and book on LATEX but it is essential to
the beginner and therefore bears repetition. Some of it appears
other forms elsewhere, and is included here because it needs
explaining better. And some of it appears nowhere else but this
document. I took the opportunity to revise the structure of the
training course in parallel with the book (expanding it from its
original one day to two days), and to include a more
comprehensive index. It is by no means perfect (in both senses),
and I would be grateful for comments and corrections to be sent
to me at the address given under the credits.
I had originally hoped that the LATEX version of the
document would be processable by any freshly-installed default
LATEX system, but the need to include font samples which go
well beyond the default installation, and to use some packages
which the new user is unlikely to have installed, means that
this document itself is not really a simple piece of LATEX,
however simply it may describe the process itself.
However, as the careful reader will have already noticed,
the master source of the document is not maintained in LATEX
but in XML. A future task is therefore
to compare the packages required with those installed by
default, and flag portions of the document requiring additional
features so that an abbreviated version can be generated which
can be guaranteed to process even with a basic LATEX
installation.
If you are just starting with LATEX, at an early
opportunity you should buy or borrow a copy of LATEX: A Document Preparation System which is the original
author's manual. More advanced users should get the
The LATEX Companion or one of its
successors. In the same series there are also the The LATEX Graphics Companion and the The LATEX Web Companion. Mathematical users might want to
read Short Math Guide for LATEX.
Foreword
