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LaTeX

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The LaTeX logo, typeset with LaTeX

LATEX, written as LaTeX in plain text, is a document preparation system for the TEX typesetting program.

It is widely used by mathematicians, scientists, and engineers, in academia and commercially, and by others as a primary or intermediate format (e.g. translating DocBook and other XML-based formats to PDF) due to the quality of typesetting achievable by TeX. 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 and bibliographies.

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

LaTeX was originally written in 1984 by Leslie Lamport at SRI International and has become the dominant method for using TeX—few people write in plain TeX anymore. The current version is (LaTeX2e). LaTeX, like TeX, is free software.

The typesetting system

File:LaTeX Document in Apple Preview.png
PDF document typeset using LaTeX.

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. In addition, there are numerous commercial implementations of the entire TeX system, including LaTeX, to which 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 popularity of XML systems and the demand for large-scale batch production of publication-quality typesetting from such 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.

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 voiceless velar plosive like the first sound of "kit"). 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 Scottish "loch" or German "Bach"). 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”.

Implementations, distributions, and licensing

LaTeX is typically distributed along with plain TeX, and same considerations apply to its implementations: LaTeX is available on operating systems including Linux, Unix, Windows, and Mac OS X, and in fact, two different implementations are typically available on each system: one that outputs a DVI file, and another based on pdftex, which outputs an Adobe Acrobat PDF file. The default font 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/LaTeX distributions are available, including TexLive (multiplatform), teTeX (unix), fpTeX (which appears to be defunct as of May 2005), MiKTeX (Windows), CMacTeX, and OzTex (Macintosh).

LaTeX 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 in the works. The LPPL is DFSG compliant since its version 1.3.

Editors and IDEs

There are many editors and IDEs available.

Tools and packages

  • Beamer (LaTeX): Create sophisticated, structured presentations and slides using LaTeX.
  • LaTeX2RTF: Translator program which is intended to convert a LaTeX document into the RTF format.
Wikibooks has a book on the topic of: LaTeX

Tutorials

Books

  • Mittelbach, Frank, and Goossens, Michel (2004). The LaTeX Companion, Second Edition. Addison-Wesley. ISBN 0-201-36299-6.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link). The Companion is an excellent resource for intermediate to advanced LaTeX users. For those already somewhat familiar with LaTeX, this is probably the single most useful available book on the subject. The book website has the complete Table of Contents and a sample chapter available for download.
  • Lamport. LaTeX: A document preparation system, 2nd edition User's guide and reference manual. ISBN. sample pages out of the book
  • Kopka, Helmut and Daly, Patrick W. Guide to LaTeX. ISBN 0-321-17385-6.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) sample pages out of the book
  • D. F. Griffiths. Learning LaTeX. searchable version with sample pages

Platform-specific topics

Online reference materials

Community resources

Periodicals

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