An introduction to

Selander, C93 (selander@cs.umu.se)

980521

The object is to introduce LaTeX as a natural tool for new students of Computing Science and Engineering at Umeå University, as well as the members of the Academic Computer Club (ACC).

Abstract

Contents

Introduction

Background

Preparations

The basics

References

On the educational programme in Computing Science and Engineering at Umeå University, the first year students solves their assignments on PC:s running Windows/NT. Therefore they naturally writes their reports in Word for Windows. But from the beginning of their second year, most course assignments are to be solved under UNIX. Some students tend to return down to the PC:s when it's time to make the report, but many of the more dedicated and overall most curious - the ones that show hackerish signs - takes the time to learn LaTeX. As Emma put it, having given up on FrameMaker after severel hours trying to master headers and footers: -"Ok, show me that LaTeX-thing then". One and a half hour later, when we asked how thing were going with her report she responded: -"LaTeX is so much fun!".

LaTeX is much like HTML, a lot of tags to achieve diffrent things. A markup-language for document preparation. It is fun and easy to use, and yet somewhat macho. The ASCII-based document sources is small - just a few years back, LaTeX was the only chance to be able to keep ones reports within the limited quota of the student users on the departments computer system.

LaTeX is quite advanced, but you just need a small subset of the total functionallity to make a simple report on a course assignment. This core subset is what this introductory paper is to cover.

In 1977 Donald E. Knuth was about to write yet another book on computer programming, but he was annoyed at the declining quality of the typesetting of other of his books. So in a outburst of true hackerstyle energy he set out to write his own typesetting system TeX, figuring that it would be finished in a year. It took about nine before the last version of TeX finally was frozen.

TeX is a very powerful macro-based text formatter wchich allows an author to control every detail of the apperance of a text on a paper. Because of its quality and that it is public domain, TeX has become the de facto standard text-processing system in many academic departments and research laboratories. It is availible on most computer platforms, from PCs to super computers.

However, TeX isn't especially easy to use. You don't want to determinate where to put every word every time. Therefor did Leslie Lamport in 1980 write the document preparation system LaTeX, that is based on TeX. LaTeX adds a level of abstraction to the plain TeX and allows the user to concentrate on the structure of the document, rather than on formatting details.

template.tex

Oetiker, T, The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX 2e (Or LaTeX 2e in 89 minutes) , Version 3.1, 1998