LaTeX

Original author(s) Leslie Lamport

Platform Cross-platform

Type Typesetting

License LaTeX Project Public License

(LPPL)

Website latex-project.org (http://latex-

project.org)

LaTeXFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

LaTeX (/ˈleɪtɛk/ LAY-tek or /ˈlɑːtɛk/ LAH-tek[1]) is a document preparation system anddocument markup language. LaTeX uses the TeX typesetting program for formatting itsoutput, and is itself written in the TeX macro language. LaTeX is not the name of a particularediting program, but refers to the encoding or tagging conventions that are used in LaTeXdocuments. Almost any editing program or word-processor may be used to write LaTeXdocuments, although there are many editing programs written specially to make using LaTeXeasy. Interactive websites and smartphone apps are increasingly (2013) generalizing and

simplifying the tasks of writing documents with LaTeX[citation needed].

LaTeX is widely used in academia.[2][3] It is also used as the primary method of displayingformulas on Wikipedia. LaTex can be used as a primary or intermediate format, e.g.,translating DocBook and other XML-based formats to PDF. The typesetting system offersprogrammable desktop publishing features and extensive facilities for automating most aspectsof typesetting and desktop publishing, including numbering and cross-referencing, tables andfigures, page layout and bibliographies.

Like TeX, LaTeX started as a writing tool for mathematicians and computer scientists. But from early in its development it was also taken up byscholars who needed to write documents that included complex non-Latin scripts, such as Arabic, Sanskrit and Chinese.

LaTeX is intended to provide a high-level language that accesses the power of TeX. LaTeX essentially comprises a collection of TeX macros and aprogram to process LaTeX documents. Because the TeX formatting commands are very elementary, it offers authors ready-made commands forcommon requirements such as chapter headings, footnotes, cross-references and bibliographies.

LaTeX was originally written in the early 1980s by Leslie Lamport at SRI International.[4] The current version is LaTeX2e (styled as LATEX2ε).

LaTeX is free software and is distributed under the LaTeX Project Public License (LPPL).

Contents

1 Typesetting system

2 Examples

3 Pronouncing and writing "LaTeX"

4 Licensing

5 Related software

6 Versions

7 Compatibility

8 See also

9 References

10 Further reading

11 External links

Typesetting system

LaTeX is based on the philosophy that authors should be able to focus on the content of what they are writing without being distracted by its visualpresentation. In preparing a LaTeX document, the author specifies the logical structure using familiar concepts such as chapter, section, table,figure, etc., and lets the LaTeX system worry about the presentation of these structures. It therefore encourages the separation of layout fromcontent while still allowing manual typesetting adjustments where needed. This is similar to the mechanism by which many word processors allowstyles to be defined globally for an entire document or the use of Cascading Style Sheets to style HTML.

LaTeX can be arbitrarily extended by using the underlying macro language to develop custom formats. Such macros are often collected intopackages, which are available to address special formatting issues such as complicated mathematical content or graphics. Indeed, in the examplebelow, the align environment is provided by the amsmath package.

In order to create a document in LaTeX, you first write a .tex file in your text editor. Then you give your .tex file as input to the TeX programme

(with the LaTeX macros loaded), and TeX writes out a file suitable for viewing onscreen or printing.[5] This write-format-preview cycle is one of thechief ways in which working with LaTeX differs from what-you-see-is-what-you-get word processing. Many LaTeX-aware editing programs make

this cycle a simple matter of pressing a single key, while showing the output preview on the screen beside the input window.

Examples

The example below shows the LaTeX input and corresponding output:

Markup Renders as

\documentclass[12pt]{article}\usepackage{amsmath}\title{\LaTeX}\date{}\begin{document} \maketitle \LaTeX{} is a document preparation system for the \TeX{} typesetting program. It offers programmable desktop publishing features and extensive facilities for automating most aspects of typesetting and desktop publishing, including numbering and cross-referencing, tables and figures, page layout, bibliographies, and much more. \LaTeX{} was originally written in 1984 by Leslie Lamport and has become the dominant method for using \TeX; few people write in plain \TeX{} anymore. The current version is \LaTeXe. % This is a comment, not shown in final output. % The following shows typesetting power of LaTeX: \begin{align} E_0 &= mc 2 \\ E &= \frac{mc 2}{\sqrt{1-\frac{v 2}{c 2}}} \end{align}\end{document}

Note how the equation for was typeset by the markup:

E &= \frac{mc2}{\sqrt{1-\frac{v2}{c2}}}

The square root is denoted by "sqrt" and fractions by "frac".

Pronouncing and writing "LaTeX"

LaTeX is usually pronounced /ˈleɪtɛk/ or /ˈlɑːtɛk/ in English (that is, not with the /ks/ pronunciation English speakers normally associate with X, butwith a /k/).

The characters T, E, X in the name come from capital Greek letters tau, epsilon, and chi, as the name of TeX derives from the Greek: τέχνη (skill,

art, technique); for this reason, TeX's creator Donald Knuth promotes a pronunciation of /tɛx/ (tekh)[6] (that is, with a voiceless velar fricative as inModern Greek, similar to the ch in loch). Lamport, on the other hand, has said he does not favor or discourage any pronunciation for LaTeX.

The name is traditionally printed in running text with a special typographical logo: LATEX. In media where the logo cannot be precisely reproduced

in running text, the word is typically given the unique capitalization LaTeX. The TeX, LaTeX[7] and XeTeX[8] logos can be rendered via pure CSS

and XHTML for use in graphical web browsers following the specifications of the internal \LaTeX macro.[9]

Licensing

LaTeX is typically distributed along with plain TeX. It is distributed under a free software license, the LaTeX Project Public License (LPPL). TheLPPL is not compatible with the GNU General Public License, as it requires that modified files must be clearly differentiable from their originals(usually by changing the filename); this was done to ensure that files that depend on other files will produce the expected behavior and avoiddependency hell. The LPPL is DFSG compliant as of version 1.3. As free software, LaTeX is available on most operating systems including UNIX(Solaris, HP-UX, AIX), BSD (FreeBSD, Mac OS X, NetBSD, OpenBSD), GNU/Linux (Red Hat, Debian, Arch, Gentoo), Microsoft Windows(9x, XP, Vista, 7, 8), DOS, RISC OS, AmigaOS and Plan9.

Related software

As a macro package, LaTeX provides a set of macros for TeX to interpret. There are many other macro packages for TeX, including Plain TeX,GNU Texinfo, AMSTeX, and ConTeXt.

When TeX "compiles" a document, it follows (from the user's point of view) the following processing sequence: Macros → TeX → Driver →Output. Different implementations of each of these steps are typically available in TeX distributions. Traditional TeX will output a DVI file, which isusually converted to a PostScript file. More recently, Hàn Thế Thành and others have written a new implementation of TeX called pdfTeX, whichalso outputs to PDF and takes advantage of features available in that format. The XeTeX engine developed by Jonathan Kew merges modern fonttechnologies and Unicode with TeX.

The default font for LaTeX is Knuth's Computer Modern, which gives default documents created with LaTeX the same distinctive look as thosecreated with plain TeX. XeTeX allows the use of OpenType and TrueType (that is, outlined) fonts for output files.

There are also many editors for LaTeX.

Versions

LaTeX2e is the current version of LaTeX, since it replaced Latex 2.09 in 1994. As of 2013, a future version called LaTeX3, started in the early

1990s, is still in development.[10] Planned features include improved syntax, hyperlink support, a new user interface, access to arbitrary fonts, and

new documentation.[11]

There are numerous commercial implementations of the entire TeX system. System vendors may add extra features like additional typefaces andtelephone support. LyX is a free, WYSIWYM visual document processor that uses LaTeX for a back-end. TeXmacs is a free, WYSIWYG editorwith similar functionalities as LaTeX but a different typesetting engine. Other WYSIWYG editors that produce LaTeX include Scientific Word onMS Windows.

A number of TeX distributions are available, including TeX Live (multiplatform), teTeX (deprecated in favor of TeX Live, UNIX), fpTeX(deprecated), MiKTeX (Windows), proTeXt (Windows), MacTeX (TeX Live with the addition of Mac specific programs), gwTeX (Mac OS X),OzTeX (Mac OS Classic), AmigaTeX (no longer available) and PasTeX (AmigaOS, available on the Aminet repository).

Compatibility

LaTeX documents (*.tex) can be opened with any text editor. Additionally, TeX documents can be shared by rendering the LaTeX file to Rich

Text Format (.rtf) or XML. This can be done using the free software programs LaTeX2RTF or TeX4ht. LaTeX can also be rendered to PDF filesusing the tool pdfLaTeX.

See also

AMS-LaTeX – American Mathematical Society extension for LaTeXxdvi – software for viewing DVI files while using Unix

BibTeX reference management software typically used with LaTeXComparison of TeX editors

List of document markup languagesREVTeX – Publication Styles of the American Physical Society

Formula editorMathML

References

1. ^ "An introduction to LaTeX" (http://latex-project.org/intro.html).

2. ^ "What are TeX, LaTeX and friends?" (http://www.ctan.org/what_is_tex.html).

3. ^ Alexia Gaudeul (March 27, 2006). Do Open Source Developers Respond to Competition?: The (La)TeX Case Study. SSRN 908946(//ssrn.com/abstract=908946).

4. ^ Leslie Lamport (April 23, 2007). "The Writings of Leslie Lamport: LaTeX: A Document Preparation System"(http://research.microsoft.com/users/lamport/pubs/pubs.html#latex). Leslie Lamport's Home Page. Retrieved 2007-04-27.

5. ^ PDF output it common, but TeX can output other formats such as DVI ("Device independent" format). See below for more detail about outputs.

6. ^ Donald E. Knuth, The TeXbook, Addison–Wesley, Boston, 1986, p. 1.

7. ^ O'Connor, Edward. "TeX and LaTeX logo POSHlets" (http://edward.oconnor.cx/2007/08/tex-poshlet). Retrieved 2008-04-21.

8. ^ Taraborelli, Dario. "CSS-driven TeX logos" (http://nitens.org/taraborelli/texlogo). Retrieved 2008-04-21.

9. ^ Walden, David (2005-07-15). "Travels in TeX Land: A Macro, Three Software Packages, and the Trouble with TeX"(http://www.tug.org/pracjourn/2005-3/walden-travels/). The PracTeX journal (3). Retrieved 2008-04-21.

10. ^ See e.g. bubl.ac.uk (http://bubl.ac.uk/archive/journals/texdig/v93n1193.htm)

11. ^ Frank Mittelbach, Chris Rowley (January 12, 1999). "The LaTeX3 Project" (http://www.latex-project.org/guides/ltx3info.pdf) (PDF). Retrieved2007-07-30.

Further reading

Griffiths, David F.; Highman, David S. (1997). Learning LaTeX. Philadelphia: Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. ISBN 0-89871-383-8.Kopka, Helmut; Daly, Patrick W. (2003). Guide to LaTeX (4th ed.). Addison-Wesley Professional. ISBN 0-321-17385-6.Lamport, Leslie (1994). LaTeX: A document preparation system: User's guide and reference. illustrations by Duane Bibby (2nd ed.). Reading, Mass:Addison-Wesley Professional. ISBN 0-201-52983-1.Mittelbach, Frank; Goosens, Michel (2004). The LaTeX Companion (2nd ed.). Addison-Wesley. ISBN 0-201-36299-6.Flynn, Peter (2011) [2002]. Formatting Information: A Beginner's Guide to LaTeX (http://latex.silmaril.ie/formattinginformation/) (5th online ed.).Cork: Silmaril. p. 193.

External links

Official website (http://latex-project.org)

LaTeX wikiCTAN — the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network (http://www.ctan.org)

The TeX Users Group (http://tug.org/)TeX and LaTeX questions and answers at StackExchange (http://tex.stackexchange.com/)

LaTeX3 newsletter (http://www.latex-project.org/l3news/)LaTeX Templates (http://www.LaTeXTemplates.com)

Ubuntu GNU/Linux documentation about LaTeX (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LaTeX) - pleasantly clear

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