LaTeX

This article is about the typesetting system. For the editing of formulas on Wikipedia, see Help:Displaying a formula.

The LaTeX logo, typeset with LaTeX

LaTeX is a document markup language and document preparation system for the TeX typesetting program. Within the typesetting system, its name is styled as $\mathrm {L\!\!^{{}_{\scriptstyle A}}\!\!\!\!\!\;\;T\!_{\displaystyle E}\!X}$.

It is widely used by mathematicians, scientists, philosophers, engineers, scholars in academia and the commercial world, and other professionals. As a primary or intermediate format (e.g. translating DocBook and other XML-based formats to PDF) LaTeX is used because of the quality of typesetting achievable by TeX. The typesetting system 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 and bibliographies.

LaTeX is intended to provide a high-level language that accesses the power of TeX. LaTeX essentially comprises a collection of TeX macros and a program to process LaTeX documents. Because the TeX formatting commands are very low-level, it is usually much simpler for end-users to use LaTeX.

LaTeX was originally written in the early 1980s by Leslie Lamport at SRI International . It has become the dominant method for using TeX—few people write in plain TeX anymore. The current version is LaTeX2e (styled $\mathrm {L\!\!^{{}_{\scriptstyle A}}\!\!\!\!\!\;\;T\!_{\displaystyle E}\!X} \,2_{\displaystyle \varepsilon }$).

LaTeX, like TeX, is free software.

The typesetting system

LaTeX is based on the idea that authors should be able to focus on the meaning of what they are writing without being distracted by the visual presentation of the information. 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 from content while still allowing manual typesetting adjustments where needed. This is similar to the mechanism by which many word processors allow styles to be defined globally for an entire document or the CSS mechanism used by HTML.

LaTeX can be arbitrarily extended by using the underlying macro language to develop custom formats. Such macros are often collected into packages, which are available to address special formatting issues such as complicated mathematical content or graphics. There are numerous commercial implementations of the entire TeX system. System vendors may add extra features like additional typefaces and telephone support. LyX is a free visual document processor that uses LaTeX for a back-end. TeXmacs is a free, WYSIWYG editor with similar functionalities as LaTeX but a different typesetting engine.

A number of popular commercial desktop publishing systems use modified versions of the original TeX typesetting engine. The recent rise in the popularity of XML systems and the demand for large-scale batch production of publication-quality typesetting from these systems and other sources has seen a steady increase in the use of LaTeX.

The example below shows the LaTeX input:

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\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.
  \newline
  % This is a comment, it is not shown in the final output.
  % The following shows a little of the typesetting power of LaTeX
  \begin{eqnarray}
    E &=& mc^2                              \\
    m &=& \frac{m_0}{\sqrt{1-\frac{v^2}{c^2}}}
  \end{eqnarray}
\end{document}

This input would produce the following LaTeX output:

Example from Online LaTeX HTML /Flash.

Pronouncing and writing "LaTeX"

LaTeX is usually pronounced [ˈleɪ.tɛk] or [ˈlɑ.tɛk] in English (that is, not with the [ks] pronunciation English speakers normally associate with X, but with a [k]). The last character in the name comes from a capital Χ (chi), as the name of TeX derives from the Greek τέχνη (skill, art, technique); for this reason, TeX's creator Donald Knuth promotes a /tɛx/ pronunciation (that is, with a voiceless velar fricative as in Modern Greek, or the last sound of the Scottish word "loch" or the German word "Bach", similar to the Spanish "j" or Arabic "خ" sounds). Lamport, on the other hand, has said he does not favor or discourage any pronunciation for LaTeX.

The name is traditionally printed with the special typographical logo shown on this page. In media where the logo cannot be precisely reproduced in running text, the word is typically given the unique capitalization LaTeX to avoid confusion with the word “latex”.

Licensing, implementations, and distributions

LaTeX is typically distributed along with plain TeX. It is distributed under a free software license, the LaTeX Project Public License (LPPL). The LPPL is not compatible with the GNU General Public License, as it requires that modified files also modify the actual physical file names; this was done to ensure that files that depend on other files will produce the expected behavior and avoid dependency hell. A new version of the LPPL that will be compatible with the GPL is under development. The LPPL is DFSG compliant as of version 1.3. As free/open source software, LaTeX is available on most operating systems including Linux, Unix, Windows, Mac OS X and AmigaOS. It is noteworthy to mention that the first DVI previewers capable of on-screen previewing and modification of LaTeX documents were Amigas^[1][2].

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

When TeX "compiles" your document, the processing loop (from the user's point of view) goes like this: Macros > TeX > Driver > Output. Different implementations of each of these steps is typically available in TeX distributions. Traditional TeX will output a DVI file, which is usually converted to a PostScript file. More recently, Hàn Thế Thành and others have written a new implementation of TeX called pdfTeX, which also outputs to PDF and takes advantages of features available in that format. The XeTeX engine developed by Jonathan Kew merges modern font technologies with TeX.

The default font for LaTeX is Knuth's Computer Modern, which gives most documents created with LaTeX the same distinctive look and feel as those created with plain TeX.

A number of TeX distributions are available, including TeX Live (multiplatform), teTeX (deprecated, Unix), fpTeX (deprecated), MiKTeX (Windows), MacTeX, gwTeX (Mac OS X), OzTeX (Mac OS Classic), AmigaTeX (no longer available) and PasTeX (AmigaOS) available on Aminet repository.

1. ^ : In 1986 Tomas Rokicki printed his first page with dvisw, an early DVI printer driver for the Amiga, on a QMS SmartWriter using AmigaTeX by Radical Eye Software. A link to a relic info about milestones of LaTeX history is available at this external site.
2. ^ : Description of Amiga system used by Tomas Rokicki in an article on TUG official review Tugboat: TUGboat, volume 9, (1998) n.1; Site Reports "The Commodore Amiga: A Magic Machine" by Tomas Rokicki, also available in PDF format at this external site

Versions

LaTeX2e is the current version of LaTeX. As of 2007, a future version called LaTeX3 is in development. Planned features include improved syntax, hyperlink support, a new user interface, access to arbitrary fonts, and new documentation.

References

• Mittelbach, Frank (2004). The LaTeX Companion (2nd edition ed.). Addison-Wesley. ISBN 0-201-36299-6. {{cite book}}: |edition= has extra text (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Lamport, Leslie (1994). LaTeX: A document preparation system: User's guide and reference. illustrations by Duane Bibby (2nd edition ed.). Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley Professional. ISBN 0-201-52983-1. {{cite book}}: |edition= has extra text (help)
• Kopka, Helmut (2003). Guide to LaTeX (4th edition ed.). Addison-Wesley Professional. ISBN 0-321-17385-6. {{cite book}}: |edition= has extra text (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Griffiths, David F. (1997). Learning LaTeX. Philadelphia: Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. ISBN 0-898-71383-8. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)

External links

• Official LaTeX project site website for open development of LaTeX (has links to and documentation for LaTeX2e and to experimental prerelease code which may be used in LaTeX3)
• CTAN – The Comprehensive TeX Archive Network Latest (La)TeX-related packages and software
• The UK TeX FAQ maintained by Robin Fairbairns
• The TeX Users Group has extensive links to other information, including meetings, conferences, typesetting, the TUGboat journal, and local user groups in many countries
• Comparison of Word and LaTeX in scientific writing - efficiency, layout, costs, compatibility, figures, references