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Volume 24, Number 1
September 2007
Printable

LaTeX: A Document Preparation System

by Michael Holzmann, UNT Student

LaTeX (pronounced Lah-tech) is a document preparation system for the TeX (pronounced tech) typesetting program. This program is primarily used by mathematicians, scientists and engineers because of its emphasis on mathematical formulae, high-quality typesetting and management of large documents. LaTeX was created in 1984 by Leslie Lamport at SRI International and is the most popular way of using TeX. The typesetter TeX was created by Donald Knuth in the early 70's because he disliked the photographic techniques used for fonts.

LaTeX Basics

The main idea behind LaTeX is to separate the content of the document from the design of the document. This allows the author to focus on the content of the document without the distraction of how it looks. The author specifies the content of the document, such as author, title, date and chapters. A markup language is used to achieve this and, for that reason, LaTeX documents are often referred to as programs.

Here are some advantages of using LaTeX:

  • Adding mathematical formulae is very easy.
  • Generation of table of contents, footnotes, references and bibliographies is very easy.
  • LaTeX is supported on a variety operating systems.
  • Management of large documents is very easy because layout and content are separated.

Source file example.tex

\documentclass {article}
\title{LaTeX Example}
\author {Michael Holzmann}
\date{March 4th 2007}
\begin{document}
\maketitle
\begin{displaymath}
\sum_{i=1}^n i^3 = \frac{n(n+1)}{n}^2
\end{displaymath}
\end{document}

Compiled Document

Additional Resources