Formatting information A beginner's introduction to typesetting with LATEX Peter Flynn Silmaril Consultants Textual Therapy Division v. 3.6 (March 2005)	Contents 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
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.	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.

Introduction

This book originally accompanied a 2-day course on using the LATEX typesetting system. It has been extensively revised and updated and can now be used for self-study or in the classroom. It is aimed at users of Linux, Macintosh, or Microsoft Windows but it can be used with LATEX systems on any platform, including other Unix workstations, mainframes, and even your Personal Digital Assistant (PDA).

Who needs this book?

The audience for the original training course was assumed to be computer-literate and composed of professional, business, academic, technical, or administrative computer users. The readers of the book (you) are mostly assumed to be in a similar position, but may also come from many other backgrounds, including hobbyists, students, and just people interested in quality typesetting. You are expected to have one or more of the following or similar objectives:

producing typesetter-quality formatting;
formatting long, complex, highly-structured, repetitive, or automatically-generated documents;¹
saving time and effort by automating common tasks;
achieving or maintaining your independence from specific makes or models of proprietary hardware, software, or file formats (portability);
using Open Source software (free of restrictions, sometimes also free of charge).

LATEX can easily be used for once-off or short and simple documents as well, but its real strengths lie in consistency and automation.

Skills needed

LATEX is a very easy system to learn, and requires no specialist knowledge, although literacy and some familiarity with the publishing process is useful. It is, however, assumed that you are completely fluent and familiar with using your computer before you start. Specifically, effective use of this document requires that you already know and understand the following very thoroughly:

how to use a good plain-text editor (not a wordprocessor like OpenOffice, WordPerfect, or Microsoft Word, and not a toy like Microsoft Notepad);
where to find all 95 of the printable ASCII characters on your keyboard and what they mean, and how to type accents and symbols, if you use them;
how to create, open, save, close, rename, move, and delete files and folders (directories);
how to use a Web browser and/or File Transfer Protocol (FTP) program to download and save files from the Internet;
how to uncompress and unwrap (unzip or detar) downloaded files.

If you don't know how to do these things yet, it's important to go and learn them first. Trying to become familiar with the fundamentals of using a computer at the same time as learning LATEX is not likely to be as effective as doing them in order.

These are not specialist skills — they are all included in the European Computer Driving Licence (ECDL) and the relevant sections of the ECDL syllabus are noted in the margin above, so they are well within the capability of anyone who uses a computer.

Objectives of this book

By the end of this book, you should be able to undertake the following tasks:

use a plain-text editor to create and maintain your documents;
add LATEX markup to identify your document structure and formatting requirements;
typeset LATEX documents, correct simple formatting errors, and display or print the results;
identify, install, and use additional packages (using CTAN for downloading where necessary);
recognise the limitations of procedural markup systems and choose appropriate generic markup methods where appropriate.

Synopsis

The original course covered the following topics as separate sessions, which are represented in the book as chapters:

Where to get and how to install LATEX (teTEX, fpTEX, or proTEXt from the TEX Collection disks);
How to type LATEX documents: using an editor to create files (half a dozen editors for LATEX);
Basic structures (the Document Class Declaration and its layout options; the document environment with sections and paragraphs);
Typesetting, viewing, and printing;
The use of packages and CTAN to adapt formatting using standard tools;
Other document structures (lists, tables, figures, images, and verbatim text);
Textual tools (footnotes, marginal notes, cross-references, indexes and glossaries, and bibliographic citations);
Typographic considerations (white-space and typefaces; inline markup and font changes; extra font installation and automation);
Programmability and automation (macros and modifying LATEX's behaviour);
Conversion and compatibility with other systems (XML, Word, etc.).

A few changes have been made in the transition to printed and online form, but the basic structure is the same, and the document functions as a workbook for the course as well as a standalone self-teaching guide.

Where's the math?

It is important to note that the document does not cover mathematical typesetting, complex tabular material, the design of large-scale macros and document classes, or the finer points of typography or typographic design, although it does refer to these topics in passing on a few occasions.

There are several other guides, introductions, and ‘get-started’ documents on the Web and on CTAN which cover these topics and more. Among the more popular are:

Getting Started with TEX, LATEX, and friends, where all beginners should start;
The (Not So) Short Guide to LATEXε: LATEXε in 131 Minutes is a good beginner's tutorial;
A Gentle Introduction to TEX: A Manual for Self-Study is a classic tutorial on Plain TEX;
Using imported graphics in LATEXε shows you how to do (almost) anything with graphics: side-by-side, rotated, etc.;
Short Math Guide for LATEX gets you started with the American Math Society's powerful packages;
A comprehensive list of symbols in TEX shows over 2,500 symbols available.

This list was taken from the CTAN search page. There are also lots of books published about TEX and LATEX: the most important of these for users of this document are listed in the last paragraph in the Foreword.

Availability of LATEX systems

Because the TEX program (the ‘engine’ which actually does the typesetting) is separate from whichever editor you choose, TEX-based systems are available in a variety of different modes using different interfaces, depending on how you want to use them.

Graphical interface

The normal way to run LATEX is to use a toolbar button (icon), a menu item, or a keystroke in your editor. Click on it and your document gets saved and typeset. All the other features of LATEX systems (the typeset display, spellchecker, related programs like makeindex and BIBTEX) are run the same way. This works both in a normal Graphical User Interface (GUI) as well as in text-only interfaces.

In the popular LATEX editors like Emacs, TEXshell, TEXnicCenter, WinShell, or WinEdt, a record of the typesetting process is shown in an adjoining window so that you can see the progress of pages being typeset, and any errors or warnings that may occur.²

Command-line interface

However, the graphical interface is useless if you want to run LATEX unattended, as part of an automated system, perhaps in a web server or e-commerce environment, where there is no direct connection between user and program. The underlying TEX engine is in fact a Command-Line Interface (CLI) program, that is, it is used as a ‘console’ program which you run from a standard Unix or Mac terminal or shell window (or from an MS-DOS command window in Microsoft Windows systems). You type the command latex followed by the name of your document file (see in section 4.1.2 for an example).

Commands like these let you run LATEX in an automated environment like a Common Gateway Interface (CGI) script on a web server or a batch file on a document system. All the popular distributions for Unix and Windows, both free and commercial, include this interface as standard (teTEX, fpTEX, MiKTEX, proTEXt, PC-TEX, TrueTEX, etc.).

Typeset displays

LATEX usually displays your typeset results in a separate window, redisplayed automatically every time the document is reprocessed, because the typesetting is done separately from the editing. Some systems, however, can format the typesetting while you type, at the expense of some flexibility.

Asynchronous typographic displays

This method is called an asynchronous typographic display because the typeset window only updates after you have typed something and reprocessed it, not while you are still typing, as it would with a wordprocessor.³

Synchronous typographic displays

Some distributions of LATEX offer a synchronous typographic interface. In these, you type directly into the typographic display, as with a wordprocessor. Three popular examples are Textures, Scientific Word, and VTEX (see table below). At least one free version (LYX, see Figure 2.1 in section 2.3) offers a similar interface.

With a synchronous display you get Instant Textual Gratification™, but your level of control is restricted to that of the GUI you use, which cannot provide access to everything that LATEX can do. For complete control of the formatting you may still need access to your normal source (input) file in the same way as for asynchronous implementations.

Near-synchronous displays

There are several other methods available free for Unix and some other systems for close-to-synchronous updates of the typeset display (including Jonathan Fine's Instant Preview and the TEX daemon), and for embedding typographic fragments from the typeset display back into the editor window (David Kastrup's preview-latex package).

Commercial distributions

Whatever method you choose, the TEX Collection CD and CTAN are not the only source of software. The vendors listed in Table offer excellent commercial implementations of TEX and LATEX, and if you are in a position where their enhanced support and additional features are of benefit, I urge you to support them. In most cases their companies, founders, and staff have been good friends of the TEX and LATEX communities for many years.

*Table 1*. Popular commercial implementations of TEX systems
Product	Platform	Company	URI
PCTEX	MS-Windows	Personal TEX, Inc	`www.pctex.com/`
TrueTEX	MS-Windows	True TEX	`truetex.com/`
Textures	Apple Mac	Blue Sky Research	`www.bluesky.com/`
Scientific Word	MS-Windows	Mackichan Software	`www.mackichan.com/`
VTEX	MS-Windows, Linux, OS/2	MicroPress, Inc	`www.micropress-inc.com/`

Recent versions of some editors hide this display by default unless errors occur in the typesetting.
Among other reasons, TEX typesets whole paragraphs at a time, not line-by-line as lesser systems do, in order to get the hyphenation and justification (H&J) right (see section 2.8).

Production note

This document is written and maintained in XML, using a customized version of the DocBook DTD. Conversions were made to HTML and LATEX using XSLT scripts and Michael Kay's Saxon processor.

The complete source, with all ancillary files, is available online at http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/info/beginlatex/src/ but if you want to try processing it yourself you must install Java (from Sun, IBM, or a number of others) and Saxon (from http://saxon.sourceforge.net/), in addition to LATEX.

This document is published under the terms and conditions of the GNU Free Documentation License. Details are in this appendix.

Symbols and conventions

The following typographic notations are used:

Notation	Meaning
`\command`	Control sequences which perform an action, e.g. `\newpage`
`\length`	Control sequences which store a dimension (measurement in units), e.g. `\parskip`
`counter`	Values used for counting (whole numbers, as opposed to measuring in units), e.g. `secnumdepth`
*term*	Defining instance of a new term
environment	A LATEX formatting environment
package	A LATEX package (available from CTAN)
product	Program or product name
`typewriter type`	Examples of source code (stuff you type)
mybook or value	Mnemonic examples of things you have to supply real-life values for
`x`	A key on your keyboard
`Ctrl`–`x`	Two keys pressed together
`Esc` `q`	Two keys pressed one after another
Submit	On-screen button to click
Menu→Item	Drop-down menu with items

Examples of longer fragments of input are shown with a border round them. Where necessary, the formatted output is shown immediately beneath. Warnings are shown with a shaded background. Exercises are shown with a double border.

Preface

Many people discover LATEX after years of struggling with wordprocessors and desktop publishing systems, and are amazed to find that TEX has been around for over 25 years and they hadn't heard of it. It's not a conspiracy, just ‘a well-kept secret known only to a few million people’, as one anonymous user has put it.

Perhaps a key to why it has remained so popular is that it removes the need to fiddle with the formatting while you write. Although playing around with fonts and formatting is attractive to the newcomer, it is completely counter-productive for the serious author or editor who wants to concentrate on writing — ask any journalist or professional writer.

A few years ago a new LATEX user expressed concern on the comp.text.tex newsgroup about ‘learning to write in LATEX’. Some excellent advice was posted in response to this query, which I reproduce with permission below [the bold text is my emphasis]:

No, the harder part might be writing, period. TEX/LATEX is actually easy, once you relax and stop worrying about appearance as a be-all-and-end-all. Many people have become ‘Word Processing Junkies’ and no longer ‘write’ documents, they ‘draw’ them, almost at the same level as a pre-literate 3-year old child might pretend to ‘write’ a story, but is just creating a sequence of pictures with a pad of paper and box of Crayolas — this is perfectly normal and healthy in a 3-year old child who is being creative, but is of questionable usefulness for, say, a grad student writing a Master's or PhD thesis or a business person writing a white paper, etc. For this reason, I strongly recommend not using any sort of fancy GUI ‘crutch’. Use a plain vanilla text editor and treat it like an old-fashioned typewriter. Don't waste time playing with your mouse. Note: I am not saying that you should have no concerns about the appearance of your document, just that you should write the document (completely) first and tweak the appearance later...not [spend time on] lots of random editing in the bulk of the document itself.
(11 March 2003), comp.text.tex

Learning to write well can be hard, but authors shouldn't have to make things even harder for themselves by using manually-driven systems which break their concentration every few seconds for some footling adjustment to the appearance, simply because the software is incapable of doing it right by itself.

Don Knuth originally wrote TEX to typeset mathematics for the second edition of his master-work The Art of Computer Programming, and it remains pretty much the only typesetting program to include fully-automated mathematical formatting done the way mathematicians want it. But he also published a booklet called Mathematical Writing which shows how important it is to think about what you write, and how the computer should be able to help, not hinder.

And TEX is much more than math: it's a programmable typesetting system which can be used for almost any formatting task, and LATEX has made it usable by almost anyone. Professor Knuth generously placed the entire system in the public domain, so for many years there was no publicity of the commercial kind which would have got TEX noticed outside the technical field.

Nowadays, however, there are many companies selling TEX software or services,¹ dozens of publishers accepting LATEX documents for publication, and hundreds of thousands of users using LATEX for millions of documents.²

To count yourself as a TEX or LATEX user, visit the TEX Users Group's ‘TEX Counter’ web site (and get a nice certificate!).

There is occasionally some confusion among newcomers between the two main programs, TEX and LATEX:

TEX is a typesetting program, originally written by Prof Knuth at Stanford around 1978. It implements a macro-driven typesetters' programming language of some 300 basic operations and it has formed the core of many other desktop publishing (DTP) systems. Although it is still possible to write in the raw TEX language, you need to study it in depth, and you need to be able to write macros (subprograms) to perform even the simplest of repetitive tasks.
LATEX is a user interface for TEX, designed by Leslie Lamport at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1985 to automate all the common tasks of document preparation. It provides a simple way for authors and typesetters to use the power of TEX without having to learn the underlying language. LATEX is the recommended system for all users except professional typographic programmers and computer scientists who want to study the internals of TEX.

Both TEX and LATEX have been constantly updated since their inception. Knuth has now frozen development of the TEX engine so that users and developers can have a virtually bug-free, rock-stable platform to work with.³ Typographic programming development continues with the New Typesetting System (NTS), planned as a successor to TEX. The LATEX3 project has taken over development of LATEX, and the current version is LATEXε, which is what we are concentrating on here. Details of all developments can be had from the TUG at http://www.tug.org

Debunking the mythology

Naturally, over all the years, a few myths have grown up around LATEX, often propagated by people who should know better. So, just to clear up any potential misunderstandings...

MYTH: ‘LATEX has only got one font’

Most LATEX systems can use any OpenType, TrueType, Adobe (PostScript) Type1 or Type3, or METAFONT font. This is more than most other known typesetting system. LATEX's default font is Computer Modern (based on Monotype Series 8: see the table in section 8.2), not Times Roman, and some people get upset because it ‘looks different’ to Times. Typefaces differ: that's what they're for — get used to it.

MYTH: ‘LATEX isn't WYSIWYG’

Simply not true. DVI and PDF preview is better WYSIWYG than any wordprocessor and most DTP systems. What people mean is that LATEX's typographic display is asynchronous with the edit window. This is only true for the default CLI implementations. See the first paragraph in section 3 of the Introduction for details of synchronous versions.

MYTH: ‘LATEX is obsolete’

Quite the opposite: it's under constant development, with new features being added almost weekly. Check the comp.text.tex for messages about recent uploads to CTAN. It's arguably more up-to-date than most other systems: LATEX had the Euro (€) before anyone else, it had Inuktitut typesetting before the Inuit got their own province in Canada, and it still produces better mathematics than anything else.

More mythology

MYTH: ‘LATEX is a Unix system’

People are also heard saying: ‘LATEX is a Windows system’, ‘LATEX is a Mac system’, etc., etc. ad nauseam. TEX systems run on almost every computer in use, from some of the biggest supercomputers down to handhelds (PDAs like the Sharp Zaurus). That includes Windows and Linux PCs, Macs, and all other Unix systems. If you're using something TEX doesn't run on, it must be either incredibly new, incredibly old, or unbelievably obscure.

MYTH: ‘LATEX is ‘too difficult’’

This has been heard from physicists who can split atoms; from mathematicians who can explain why π exists; from business people who can read a balance sheet; from historians who can grasp Byzantine politics; from librarians who can understand LoC and MARC; and from linguists who can decode Linear ‘B’. It's nonsense: most people grasp LATEX in 20 minutes or so. It's not rocket science (or if it is, I know any number of unemployed rocket scientists who will teach it to you).

MYTH: ‘LATEX is ‘only for scientists and mathematicians’’

Untrue. Although it grew up in the mathematical and computer science fields, two of its biggest growth areas are in the humanities and business, especially since the rise of XML brought new demands for automated web-based typesetting.

See, for example, the list of TEX vendors on Table , and the list of consultants published by TUG.
A guesstimate. With free software it's impossible to tell how many people are using it, but it's a lot.
Knuth still fixes bugs, although the chances of finding a bug in TEX these days approaches zero.

CHAPTER

Installing TEX and LATEX

Editing and display
Installation for Linux and Unix
Installation for Apple Mac
Installation for Microsoft Windows

This course is based on using one of the following distributions of TEX on the 2004 TEX Collection DVD or the 2003 TEX Live CD:

teTEX

for Linux and other Unix-like systems, including Mac OS X (Thomas Esser);

proTEXt

for Microsoft Windows (Thomas Feuerstack), based on Christian Schenk's MikTEX;

fpTEX

for Microsoft Windows (Fabrice Popineau) from the 2003 TEX Live CD.

Many other implementations of TEX, such as Tom Kiffe's CMacTEX for the Apple Macintosh, can be downloaded from CTAN. LATEX is included with all modern distributions of TEX.

The TEX Collection CD is issued annually on behalf of most of the local TEX user groups around the world (see http://www.tug.org/lugs.html for addresses), and edited by Sebastian Rahtz, Karl Berry, Manfred Lotz, and the authors of the software mentioned above. These people give an enormous amount of their personal time and energy to building and distributing these systems, and they deserve the thanks and support of the user community for all they do.

There are many other distributions of LATEX both free and commercial, as described in this Introduction: they all process LATEX identically, but there are some differences in size, speed, packaging, and (in the case of commercial distributions) price, support, and extra software provided.

One final thing before we start: publicly-maintained software like TEX is updated faster than commercial software, so always check to see if there is a more recent version of the installation. See the item ‘Use the latest versions’ in section 1.4.3 for more details.

1.1 Editing and display

When you install LATEX you will have the opportunity to decide a) which plain-text editor[s] you want to use to create and maintain your documents; and b) which preview programs you want to use to see your typesetting. This isn't much use to you if you're unfamiliar with editors and previewers, so have a look at the table below, and maybe flip ahead to section 2.3 for a moment, where there are descriptions and screenshots.

The best bet is probably to install more than one — if you've got the disk space — or maybe all of them, because you can always delete the ones you don't like.

Editors

There is a wide range of editors available: probably no other piece of software causes more flame-wars in Internet and other discussions than your choice of editor. It's a highly personal choice, so feel free to pick the one you like. My personal biases are probably revealed below, so feel equally free to ignore them.

Previewers

For displaying your typesetting before printing, you will need a previewer. All systems come with a DVI previewer for standard LATEX, but if you are intending to produce industry-standard PostScript or PDF (Adobe Acrobat) files you will need a previewer for those formats. GSview displays both PostScript and PDF files; xpdf and Adobe's own Acrobat Reader just display PDF files.

For brief details of some of the most popular editors used for LATEX, see section 2.3.

Additional downloads

For licensing reasons, the GSview PostScript/PDF previewer, the Acrobat Reader PDF previewer, and the WinEdt editor could not be distributed on the 2003 CDs. In those cases you have to download and install them separately.

GSview is available for all platforms from http://www.ghostscript.com/gsview/index.htm (on Unix and VMS systems it's also available as GhostView and gv: see http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/)

Acrobat Reader (all platforms) can be downloaded from http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html

WinEdt (Microsoft Windows only) comes from http://www.winedt.com

1.2 Installation for Linux and Unix

Make sure your system libraries and utilities are up to date. If you are using Red Hat Linux, use yum or up2date to download and install updates. For Debian and other distributions, use apt-get or similar. On Red Hat systems, remove any RPM version of teTEX and associated utilities which may have been preinstalled, in order to avoid version conflicts.

If you are installing TEX Live to a new partition, and you have the opportunity to reformat the partition before use, use mkfs with a granularity as small as it will go (usually 1024 bytes). This avoids the partition running out of inodes because TEX uses very large numbers of very small files.

Plan the installation carefully if you are installing for multiple users (a shared machine): read section 5.2 for some comments on where to put additional files downloaded later, and see the FAQ on the same topic at http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=wherefiles

Above all, Read The Fine Manual (RTFM). The documentation is in live.html and live.pdf on the disk in the directory texlive2004/texmf-doc/doc/english/texlive-en/

Figure 1.1: TEX Live installation manual

# cd /mnt/cdrom/texlive2004
# sh install-tl.sh

The installer runs in a shell window, so it can be done even from headless systems (those with no X Window client), but it does need to be installed as root if you want to stick with the default directory locations or install it system-wide for multiple users. To install, just type the commands shown above.

The options are mostly self-explanatory, and beginners should pick the recommended scheme and leave all other settings at their defaults. The character-driven interface lets you browse around the settings changing things and looking at options before you commit to installing anything.

Figure 1.2: The Unix installation program

==================> TeX Live installation procedure <=================

===> Note: Letters/digits in <angle brackets> indicate menu items <===
===>       for commands or configurable options                   <===

    Proposed platform: Intel x86 with GNU/Linux
    <P> over-ride system detection and choose platform
    <B> binary systems:         1 out of 10
    <S> Installation scheme (scheme_recommended)
    [customizing installation scheme:
       <C> standard collections   <L> language collections]
    20 out of 75, disk space required: 246857 kB
    <D> directories:
      TEXDIR      (The main TeX directory)        : /usr/TeX
      TEXMFLOCAL  (Directory for local styles etc): /usr/TeX/texmf-local
      VARTEXMF    (Directory for local config)    : /usr/TeX/texmf-var
    <O> options:
       [ ] alternate directory for generated fonts ()
       [ ] create symlinks in standard directories
       [ ] do not install macro/font doc tree
       [ ] do not install macro/font source tree
    <R> do not install files, set up to run off CD or DVD
    <I> start installation
    <H> help,  <Q> quit

Enter command:

‘Collections’ (the C and L options) are groups of LATEX packages that you can include or exclude. It's best to leave this alone unless you know you need something specific. The only options I sometimes set are under O: the ‘alternate directory for generated fonts’ may need to be on a different partition for performance reasons on a shared system; and I always select ‘create symlinks in standard directories’ so that the system works immediately after the post-installation configuration (after installation, run texconfig to adjust your local settings.

Figure 1.3: Running the post-installation program texconfig

Note that the Linux/Unix installation does not install any editors: it is assumed you can do this yourself from your distribution's standard package system (most likely you will already be using Emacs or vi anyway).

1.3 Installation for Apple Mac

This is exactly the same interface as for the Linux/Unix installation. You need the bash shell (see the warning in the manual for users of older systems).

There is a choice of graphical editors for the Mac: two are included on the DVD, TEXShop and ITEXMac, but they need to be installed separately, after installing TEX.

1.4 Installation for Microsoft Windows

Figure 1.1: TEX Collection 2004 DVD

Before you install TEX, make sure you have enough disk space: the default installation takes about 350Mb on a modern filesystem. The installation assumes you have a fully updated version of Windows, so visit the Microsoft Web site first (http://www.microsoft.com/) and click on Windows Update. Select and install all the relevant updates for your operating system (Windows 95, 98, ME, 2000, NT, or XP). You should be doing this regularly anyway, to keep your system healthy. You may want to run ScanDisk and give your hard disks a full surface check. TEX consists of a very large number of quite small files, so it's important that your disk is in good order.

When you insert the distribution DVD or CD, it should start the setup program automatically. If you have auto-run turned off, open My Computer, double-click on the DVD or CD drive, and then double-click Autorun to start the setup program.¹

Some builds of Windows seem to have a bug that stops Autorun starting the installation. In that case (for the TEX Collection 2004 DVD) double-click Setup.exe instead, or (for the TEX Collection 2003 CD) go to the tpm folder and double-click on TeXSetup.exe.

1.4.1 proTEXt (TEX Collection 2004)

For proTEXt from the TEX Collection DVD, follow the instructions in the PDF documentation which opens automatically when you start the setup.

Figure 1.1: proTEXt comes with its own installation guide

The documentation contains links (in large blue type) that you click on in sequence to run the installation process. (This is actually very good: everything worked first time when I did it on XP.) Basically, you need to install a) MIKTEX; b) either WinEdt (with or without some of its add-ons) or TEXnicCenter; and c) GhostScript and GSview.

You only need to install items step 3 to step 5 if you install WinEdt.

Figure 1.2: First document in TEXnicCenter

Install MIKTEX
proTEXt uses the MIKTEX distribution as its core, a long-established and popular distribution for Windows.
Install WinEdt
This is optional: it's a good editor, especially for the heavy user of a MIKTEX-based system. This is a free month's trial — after that it reminds you to cough up and register.
Install the WinEdt New LATEX Document Interface
Optional again, and only applicable if you installed WinEdt anyway. It lets you save commonly-used document settings for use in other documents of the same type.
Install the WinEdt Graphics Interface
Another optional add-on for WinEdt to provide drag-and-drop graphics insertion.
Install the WinEdt Table Designer
Last optional add-on for WinEdt, providing a new table editor.
Install TEXnicCenter
This is a free equivalent to WinEdt. The interface is slightly different (see Figure 1.2) but it is becoming very popular.
Install GhostScript and GSview
These are essential for viewing the PostScript and PDF output, especially if you don't have any other PDF viewer installed.

You get a choice of editors, but the one which features in proTEXt is TEXnicCenter. This is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) which lets you manage all the files related to each document. In many cases, of course, you'll only have one (the text itself) but if you are working with anything beyond simple articles, you'll probably have illustrations (images or diagrams), and possibly separate chapter files for larger documents, plus indexes, glossaries, bibliographies, etc. I recommend that you create a new project for each new document, even if it's a single-file article, as I did for the example in Figure 1.2.

1.4.2 TEX Live (TEX Collection 2003)

Once the installation program is running:

LATEX
Install LATEX itself from the TeXLive Software→Install on Hard Disk menu. If you're new to LATEX, pick Quick Install on the following screen. This gives you everything you need to get started, and doesn't ask any questions, it just installs it all straight away.

If you're installing under Windows NT, 2000, or XP, you may want to click on the option to install for all users if you have other users on your system.

If you want to use Emacs as your editor, click the option for XemTEX Support.²
Emacs
After installation, right-click and drag Xemacs.exe from the C:\Program Files\TeXLive\bin\win32 folder out onto your desktop and let go, then pick ‘Create Shortcut’. This places Emacs on your desktop for easy access.
WinShell and WinEdt
If you want to install WinShell, run the installer program in the support/winshell directory. For WinEdt you must go to their Web site (http://www.winedt.com/) for a downloadable version.

You don't have to install just one editor: if you've got the space, install them all so you can try them out. You can always uninstall the ones you don't want afterwards.
GSView
Ghostscript is installed automatically, but for GSView you need to go to http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/gsview/, and download the most recent version.

If you use GSView, please register your copy with Ghostgum, Pty. (http://www.ghostgum.com.au/).

Please read the TEX Live update pages at http://www.tug.org/texlive/bugs.html for details of any changes since the disks were released, and download and install any additional software required.

Note this unfortunate choice of name is nothing to do with Eberhard Matthes' MS-DOS implementation of TEX called emTEX — the ‘Xem’ is short for Xemacs.

1.4.3 Installation problems

It's always annoying when a program that's supposed to install painlessly causes trouble, and none the more so when everyone else seems to have been able to install it without problems. I've installed TEX hundreds of times and very rarely had any difficulties, but these are a few of the occasions when I did.

Bad hard disks

As recommended in section 1.4, run a scan and defragmentation of your hard disk[s] before you start. It should take under an hour on a modern machine unless you have a very large disk, and it may need overnight on an older machine. Clean your CD or DVD drive if it's been in heavy use. TEX uses a very large number of very small files, so there is a lot of disk activity during an installation. As also recommended in section 1.2, if you have the chance to reformat the hard disk, pick the smallest granularity (cluster size) possible.

Registry errors

This only affects Microsoft Windows users. The Registry is where Microsoft want software companies automatically to store details of all the programs you install. Unfortunately the Registry is grossly abused by marketing departments to try and foist undesirable links on you, the user. You will see this with many commercial programs, where a particular type of file you've been able to double-click on for years suddenly runs a different program. Some programs install obsolete or broken copies of program libraries (DLL files), overwriting ones which were working perfectly. Worse, the viruses, trojans, and worms which typically infect unprotected Windows systems can leave unwanted links to web pages, or change some of the ways in which Windows operates. The overall effect can be that the whole machine slows down, or that files which are expected to do one thing do another. The best solution is a thorough Registry clean-out, using one of the many programs available for the purpose.

Use the latest versions

Before installing, check the CTAN web site (http://www.ctan.org/ for any updated copy of the installation program. This is called install-tl.sh for Linux and Mac systems, and Setup.exe for Microsoft Windows (on the TEX Collection 2003 CD it was called TeXSetup.exe). Just occasionally a bug slips through onto the production CD or DVD, and although it's always fixed and notified on comp.text.tex, that's a high-volume newsgroup and even the sharpest eyes may miss an announcement.

Stick to the defaults

Unless you're a computer scientist or a software engineer, I suggest you never change or fiddle with the default directories for installation. I know some of them look odd, but they're that way for a purpose, especially when it comes to avoiding directories will spaces in their names, like the notorious C:\Program Files. Although most modern systems cope happily with spaces in filenames and directory names, they are usually A Bad Design Idea, and should be avoided like the plague (spaces are forbidden in web addresses for the same reason: the people who designed them knew the pitfalls). It may look snazzier to put the installation in My Cute Stuff, but please don't: you'll just make it harder to find, harder to fix problems, and more embarrassing if you have to explain it to someone else trying to help you.

CHAPTER

Using your editor to create documents

Markup
Quick start for the impatient
Editors
LATEX commands
Special characters
Quotation marks
Accents
Dimensions, hyphenation, justification, and breaking
Mathematics

LATEX documents are all plain-text files.¹ You can edit them with any editor, and transfer them to any other computer system running LATEX and they will format exactly the same. Because they are plain text they cannot corrupt your system, as they cannot be used for hiding or transporting virus infections as binary wordprocessor files can. Everything you can see is in the file and everything in the file is there for you to see: there is nothing hidden or secret and there are no manufacturers' proprietary ‘gotchas’ like suddenly going out of date with a new version.

‘Plain-text’ originally meant just the 95 printable characters of the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) — see Table C.1 — but now more commonly includes both these and the relevant 8-bit characters from one (only) character set such as ISO-8859-1 (Western Latin–1) or ISO-8859-15 (Western Latin plus the Euro sign). These are international standards which work everywhere: you should avoid using manufacturers' proprietary character sets like Microsoft Windows–1252 or Apple Macintosh Roman–8, because they may make your documents unusable on some other systems.

2.1 Markup

In a LATEX document, you type your text along with markup which identifies the important parts of your document by name, for example ‘title’, ‘section’, ‘figure’, etc. LATEX does all the formatting for you automatically, using the markup to guide its internal rules and external stylesheets for typesetting.

Markup

This is a term from printing, and originally meant the notes on how to lay the document out, or the instructions which a proofreader might add during correction. It now also means instructions or descriptions added to a computer document to act as guidelines for identification or formatting. Markup has been around for ages.

	Leabhar na h-Uidhri: The Book of the Dun Cow
	Scribner's Magazine
`.h1 Interest Rates`	Runoff	c.1970
`\section{Interest Rates}`	LATEX	1984
`<sec><ttl>Interest Rates</ttl>...`	SGML	1985
`<H1>Interest Rates</H1>`	HTML	1991

You do not need to format any of your text in your editor, because LATEX does it all by itself when it typesets. You can of course regularise or neaten its appearance in your editor for ease of editing (for example, keeping each item in a list on a separate line), but this is not required.

You will often hear LATEX markup referred to as ‘commands’ or sometimes ‘control sequences’ (the proper TEXnical term for them). For all practical purposes these terms all mean the same thing.

This course assumes that users have one of TEXshell, TEXnicCenter, WinShell, or WinEdt (Windows only), or Emacs or LYX (any platform) installed. These are discussed briefly in section 2.3, and the menus and toolbars for running LATEX are explained in Chapter 4.

2.2 Quick start for the impatient

If you already know all this stuff about editors and plain-text files and running programs, and you know your system is already correctly installed (including your editor), you'd probably like to type something in and see LATEX do its job. If you don't, then skip forward to section 2.4 and read a bit more about LATEX first.

Figure 2.1: Sample document

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage{palatino,url}
\begin{document}
\section*{My first document}

This is a short example of a \LaTeX\ document I wrote 
on \today. It shows a few simple features of automated 
typesetting, including

\begin{itemize}
\item setting the default font size to 12pt;
\item specifying `article' type for formatting;
\item using the Palatino typeface;
\item adding special formatting for URIs;
\item formatting a heading in `section' style;
\item using the \LaTeX\ logo;
\item generating today's date;
\item formatting a list of items;
\item centering and italicizing;
\item autonumbering the pages.
\end{itemize}

\subsection*{More information}

This example was taken from `Formatting Information',
which you can download from 
\url{http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/info/beginlatex/}
and use as a teach-yourself guide.

\begin{center}
\textit{Have a nice day!}
\end{center}

\end{document}

Up and running in a few minutes

Install the software
Make sure you have a properly-installed LATEX system and a copy of a suitable editor.
Create a sample document
Open your editor and type in the text exactly as shown in Figure 2.1. Do not make any changes or miss anything out or add anything different at this stage.
Save the document
Save the document as demo.tex
Run LATEX or pdfLATEX
Click on the LATEX or pdfLATEX toolbar icon or the TEX→TEX File menu item; or type latex demo or pdflatex demo in a command window.
Preview the typesetting
Click on the DVI or PDFview toolbar icon or the TEX→TEX View menu item; or type your previewer command in a terminal shell.

(Note that there may be a pause the first time you use your DVI viewer, while WYSIWYG font files are created.²)
Print it
Click on the Print toolbar icon within the viewer, or use the TEX→TEX Print menu item, or type dvips -f demo | lpr (Unix/Linux).

If you encounter any errors, it means you do need to study this chapter after all!

DVI previewers use their own font files specially created from the font outlines (TrueType, OpenType, PostScript, METAFONT, etc). The first time you use a font at a size not used before, there will be a second or two's pause while it gets created. The more you use LATEX, the less this happens.

2.3 Editors

All the text of your documents can be typed into your LATEX document from a standard keyboard using any decent plain-text editor. However, it is more convenient to

A beginner's introduction to typesetting with LATEX

Peter Flynn

Silmaril ConsultantsTextual Therapy Division