157A, Fall Semester 2006

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• 157A, Fall Semester 2006
• Brent Turner

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Presentation Contents

• What Is LaTeX?
• History of LaTeX
• LaTeX Use
• Typesetting HTML vs. LaTeX
• LaTeX Syntax
• Examples document and formula
• References

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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

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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

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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).

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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

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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)

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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.

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Typesetting HTML vs. LaTeX
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Syntax

• Using LaTeX to produce a document
• \documentclass
• \begindocument
• (The text is typed here)
• \enddocument
• 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.

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Tags a short list
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Example
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Mathematical Formula Example
This example prints the definition of variance
and standard deviation using LaTeX syntax.
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Result
Trying to do this in MSWord, or other popular
WYSIWYG editor too much work!
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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