First LaTeX session of the BIB

1. A Introduction to LTEX Session #1 Oriol Borrega Pedro Tiago Martins Universitat de Barcelona January 14, 2013 Borrega & Martins (UB) A Introduction to L TEX Session #1 January 14, 2013 1 / 39

2. Outline 1 Preliminary Remarks How a scientiﬁc document must be 2 A Why use LTEX instead of a Word Processor? A Advantages of LTEX A Disadvantages of LTEX A X is good at and appropriate for Things LTE A Things LTEX is bad at or not appropriate for 3 A What is LTEX ? History TEX A LTEX 4 A How LTEX works A How LTEX documents are created A The basic structure of a LTEX document 5 A LTEX commands and a small document Borrega & Martins (UB) Introduction to L TEX Session #1 A January 14, 2013 2 / 39

3. Preliminary Remarks Outline 1 Preliminary Remarks How a scientiﬁc document must be 2 A Why use LTEX instead of a Word Processor? A Advantages of LTEX A Disadvantages of LTEX A X is good at and appropriate for Things LTE A Things LTEX is bad at or not appropriate for 3 A What is LTEX ? History TEX A LTEX 4 A How LTEX works A How LTEX documents are created A The basic structure of a LTEX document 5 A LTEX commands and a small document Borrega & Martins (UB) Introduction to L TEX Session #1 A January 14, 2013 3 / 39

4. Preliminary Remarks How a scientific document must be A scientific document must be: Structured identification (of the author and of the work) (optional) table of contents well-defined and well-placed sections, paragraphs, footnotes, lists, figures, etc.. . . references Readable approx. 66 characters per line (there are actually studies on this. . . ) large margins (for A4 size paper or similar) or two columns serif font for main text no underlining for emphasis (underlining was widely used in the past when emphasis had to be added manually, after the writing was done) no variation between elements of the same kind Borrega & Martins (UB) A Introduction to L TEX Session #1 January 14, 2013 4 / 39

16. Why use L TEX instead of a Word Processor? A Outline 1 Preliminary Remarks How a scientiﬁc document must be 2 A Why use LTEX instead of a Word Processor? A Advantages of LTEX A Disadvantages of LTEX A X is good at and appropriate for Things LTE A Things LTEX is bad at or not appropriate for 3 A What is LTEX ? History TEX A LTEX 4 A How LTEX works A How LTEX documents are created A The basic structure of a LTEX document 5 A LTEX commands and a small document Borrega & Martins (UB) Introduction to L TEX Session #1 A January 14, 2013 5 / 39

17. Why use L TEX instead of a Word Processor? A A Why use LTEX instead of a Word Processor? A Before seeing how to actually use LTEX , let’s look at some of its advantages and disadvantages in relation to Word Processors. Borrega & Martins (UB) A Introduction to L TEX Session #1 January 14, 2013 6 / 39

18. Why use L TEX instead of a Word Processor? A A Why use LTEX instead of a Word Processor? A Before seeing how to actually use LTEX , let’s look at some of its advantages and disadvantages in relation to Word Processors. Borrega & Martins (UB) A Introduction to L TEX Session #1 January 14, 2013 6 / 39

19. Why use L TEX instead of a Word Processor? A Advantages of L TEX A A Advantages of LTEX A portability (since it’s just a plain text document, a LTEX ﬁle can be written and saved in any device—personal computer, tablet, smartphone, toaster—with any operating system, as long as there’s a text editor available) does not require a lot of processing power, which makes it basically crash-proof and extremely stable backwards compatibility/longevity (a ﬁle written in the late 80s will A work on a 2013 installation of LTEX , and probably the same will be true 20 years from now) very good reference management very high typesetting quality default document classes that make the work easier (such as article, book, etc.) it’s free software almost full separation of content and form Borrega & Martins (UB) A Introduction to L TEX Session #1 January 14, 2013 7 / 39

28. Why use L TEX instead of a Word Processor? A Disadvantages of L TEX A A Disadvantages of LTEX intimidating at ﬁrst steep learning curve although widely used in some academic circuits, it’s not as ubiquitous as, for example, Word; some editors and publishers still don’t accept it. Working on a document which requires reviewing or corrections by others can be diﬃcult there is usually no interface (menus, buttons, etc.) lack of native reviewing functionalities like commenting, change-tracking, etc. (not as problematic nowadays, since most pdf viewers have commenting functionalities) the general public sees no clear reason to use it (which contributes to the third point) Borrega & Martins (UB) A Introduction to L TEX Session #1 January 14, 2013 8 / 39

35. Why use L TEX instead of a Word Processor? A Things L TEX is good at and appropriate for A A LTEX is good at and appropriate for potentially long, well structured documents typesetting “complicated things” such as math, logic, phonetic symbols, different writing systems, etc.. . . slide presentations (such as this one) scientific posters managing bibliographic references, cross–references, table of contents, indexes, etc.. . . figures, tables, lists, etc.. . . justification and hyphenation Borrega & Martins (UB) A Introduction to L TEX Session #1 January 14, 2013 9 / 39

43. Why use L TEX instead of a Word Processor? A Things L TEX is bad at or not appropriate for A A LTEX is bad at or not appropriate for producing badly structured documents (This is really true; if the A document is not properly structured, LTEX will probably give you an error and no ouput) taking notes graphics-heavy or “creative” documents such as ﬂyers, banners, etc. (although it can be done) Borrega & Martins (UB) A Introduction to L TEX Session #1 January 14, 2013 10 / 39

47. What is L TEX ? A Outline 1 Preliminary Remarks How a scientiﬁc document must be 2 A Why use LTEX instead of a Word Processor? A Advantages of LTEX A Disadvantages of LTEX A X is good at and appropriate for Things LTE A Things LTEX is bad at or not appropriate for 3 A What is LTEX ? History TEX A LTEX 4 A How LTEX works A How LTEX documents are created A The basic structure of a LTEX document 5 A LTEX commands and a small document Borrega & Martins (UB) Introduction to L TEX Session #1 A January 14, 2013 11 / 39

48. What is L TEX ? A History A History of LTEX TEXwas designed and developed by Donald Knuth in 1978 (left) A LTEX was developed by Leslie Lamport as an extension of TEXin 1985 (right) Borrega & Martins (UB) A Introduction to L TEX Session #1 January 14, 2013 12 / 39

49. What is L TEX ? A History TEX written by Donald Knuth out of frustration with digital typesetting, when attempting to publish part of his long book “The Art of Computer Programming” the name TEXis formed by the upper-case Greek letters tau, epsilon and chi, resembling the Greek root for the English tech, as in technical (hence the pronunciation) complex typesetting system and programming language very powerful and versatile diﬃcult to use nobody really uses plain TEXanymore Borrega & Martins (UB) A Introduction to L TEX Session #1 January 14, 2013 13 / 39

56. What is L TEX ? A History A LTEX written by Leslie Lamport as a set of TEXmacros (almost like simple shortcuts for more complex commands), making it possible for mortals to use it A the name LTEX is a combination of the ﬁrst two letters in Lamport and TEX much simpler to use than TEX the user enters commands which the deﬁne the structure of the document along with the text A the formatting is taken care of by LTEX itself “packages” add extra functionality widely used (within the –TEXfamily) Borrega & Martins (UB) A Introduction to L TEX Session #1 January 14, 2013 14 / 39

64. How L TEX works A Outline 1 Preliminary Remarks How a scientiﬁc document must be 2 A Why use LTEX instead of a Word Processor? A Advantages of LTEX A Disadvantages of LTEX A X is good at and appropriate for Things LTE A Things LTEX is bad at or not appropriate for 3 A What is LTEX ? History TEX A LTEX 4 A How LTEX works A How LTEX documents are created A The basic structure of a LTEX document 5 A LTEX commands and a small document Borrega & Martins (UB) Introduction to L TEX Session #1 A January 14, 2013 15 / 39

65. How L TEX works A How L TEX documents are created A A How LTEX documents are created you write a file with all the commands and text, which will have the extension .tex A you run LTEX on that file, which will interpret all the commands in order to produce the output, at which point you will also be prompted to choose a folder for your document a beautiful .pdf file is created, suitable for printing (some auxiliary files will be created too, but there’s usually no need to mess with them) Borrega & Martins (UB) A Introduction to L TEX Session #1 January 14, 2013 16 / 39

70. How L TEX works A The basic structure of a L TEX document A A Basic structure of a LTEX ﬁle A There are three basic commands that all LTEX documents must have: documentclass{article} begin{document} end{document} Borrega & Martins (UB) A Introduction to L TEX Session #1 January 14, 2013 17 / 39

75. How L TEX works A The basic structure of a L TEX document A A Basic structure of a LTEX file The existence of these commands defines different parts of your file: documentclass[options]{article} everything that appears here is called the Preamble. Here is where you define general characteristics of your document besides the document class, such as the title, the author, the date, the input language, and other options which will influence the general layout. All of this is accomplished through the use of commands begin{document} here is where the content of your document is going to be, along with commands that define its internal structure end{document} anything that appears here will be completely ignored, even if it’s the complete works of Shakespeare Borrega & Martins (UB) A Introduction to L TEX Session #1 January 14, 2013 18 / 39

81. How L TEX works A The basic structure of a L TEX document A Minimal example Using only the mandatory commands, we can write a minimal document: documentclass{article} begin{document} Hello! end{document} Borrega & Martins (UB) Introduction to L TEX Session #1 A January 14, 2013 19 / 39

84. L TEX commands and a small document A Outline 1 Preliminary Remarks How a scientiﬁc document must be 2 A Why use LTEX instead of a Word Processor? A Advantages of LTEX A Disadvantages of LTEX A X is good at and appropriate for Things LTE A Things LTEX is bad at or not appropriate for 3 A What is LTEX ? History TEX A LTEX 4 A How LTEX works A How LTEX documents are created A The basic structure of a LTEX document 5 A LTEX commands and a small document Borrega & Martins (UB) Introduction to L TEX Session #1 A January 14, 2013 20 / 39

85. L TEX commands and a small document A Document class The document class deﬁnes the general layout of the document. Common document classes are: article (which we will be using for now) book thesis report letter We can deﬁne the document class by using the appropriate command followed by the name of the class enclosed in braces, which would make it the main argument of the command: documentclass{article} Borrega & Martins (UB) Introduction to L TEX Session #1 A January 14, 2013 21 / 39

94. L TEX commands and a small document A Optional arguments However, we can also modify the class a little bit by using optional arguments, which don’t have to be there (hence the name), and are enclosed in square brackets. If more than one is used, they must be separated by commas. Some common options include: Font size: 10pt (default), 11pt, 12pt. . . Paper size: a4paper (usually default), letterpaper. . . Orientation: portrait (default), landscape. . . Let’s say we want to write an article with 12pt fontsize and a4paper. We would declare it in the preamble the following way: documentclass[a4paper,12pt]{article} Borrega & Martins (UB) Introduction to L TEX Session #1 A January 14, 2013 22 / 39

102. L TEX commands and a small document A Packages A Packages are extensions of the basic functionality of LTEX , providing additional features when declared in the preamble. There are hundreds of packages available, for doing anything you can A think of, and many of them come with the basic installation of LTEX ; they just need to be called by us. If we were to use a package in our document—we won’t for this session, but we will later—we would do it the following way: documentclass[a4paper,12pt]{article} usepackage{nameofthepackage} (let’s ignore packages for now and delete this command from our document) Borrega & Martins (UB) Introduction to L TEX Session #1 A January 14, 2013 23 / 39

108. L TEX commands and a small document A Title, author and date Like we mentioned before, it’s a good idea to identify the document. There are three basic things: Title Author Date (if we don’t use the command, the current date is fetched from the system and used) Let’s give our document a title, author and date, using the aptly-named title, author and date commands: documentclass[a4paper,12pt]{article} title{It is very simple to write good-looking documents} author{John Smith} date{June 10, 2020} Borrega & Martins (UB) Introduction to L TEX Session #1 A January 14, 2013 24 / 39

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