LaTeX Beginner's Guide: When there’s a scientific or technical paper to write, the versatility of LaTeX is very attractive. But where can you learn about the software? The answer is this superb beginner’s guide, packed with examples and explanations.

In the first chapter, we talked about logical formatting. First, let's look at this example from that point of view. We told LaTeX that:

Though we've inserted some spaces, the distances between the words in the output remained the same. The reason is that LaTeX treats multiple spaces just like a single space. Also, a single line break has the same effect like a single space. It doesn't matter how you arrange your text in the editor using spaces or breaks, the output will stay the same.

A blank line denotes a paragraph break. Like spaces, multiple empty lines are treated as...

By putting a backslash before such a special symbol, we turned it into a LaTeX command. This command has the only purpose of printing out that symbol.

There's a wealth of symbols that we can use for math formulas, chess notation, zodiac signs, music scores, and more. We don...

At first, we used the command \emph, giving one word as an argument to this command. This argument will be typeset in italic shape, because this is the default way how LaTeX emphasizes text.

Text-formatting commands usually look like \text**{argument}, where ** stands for a two letter abbreviation like bf for bold face, it for italic, and sl for...

We encountered more font commands. By using \textsf, we've chosen the sans-serif font in the section heading. We used the command \texttt to get the typewriter font for the web address. Those commands can be used just like the font commands we've learned before.

The letters in the LaTeX standard font have so-called serifs , those small decorative details at the end of a letter's strokes. Serifs...

By using the command \sffamily, we switched over to sans serif font. This change has been made inside an argument, so it's valid only there.

We used the command \ttfamily to switch to a typewriter font. The typewriter font will be used from this point onwards. By using \rmfamily, we returned to Roman font.

These commands don't produce any output, but they will affect the following text. We will call such a command a declaration .

Now have a closer look at the section number: it's a digit with serifs, which doesn't match the remaining...

We started with an opening curly brace. The effect of the following command \sffamily lasted until we stopped it with the corresponding closing brace. That closing brace came at the end of the highlighted code. This highlighting shows the area of the code where \sffamily is valid.

We replaced every font command by the corresponding declaration. Remember, \em is the declaration version of \emph. Further, we surrounded every declaration and...

At first, we used \noindent . This command suppresses the paragraph indentation. Then we used all 10 available size declarations, starting small with \tiny and ending really big with \Huge. There are no corresponding commands taking arguments, so we would have to use curly braces to delimit their scope, as we learned to before.

The actual resulting font size depends on the base font. If your document has a base font of 12 pt, then \tiny would result in text bigger than with a base font...

By writing \begin{huge}, we told LaTeX to switch to a huge font size just like with the \huge command. \end{huge} informs LaTeX that this size change should end now. From this point onwards, the font size is the same as before \begin{huge}.

Inside this environment, we use the declaration \bfseries . Note that the effect of this declaration ended together with the end of the environment.

The empty line before \end{huge} denotes a paragraph break. Using the command \bigskip , we skipped some space vertically.

For every declaration there's a corresponding environment carrying the same name except the backslash. Using environments...

\newcommand in the highlighted line defines our command. The first argument is the name we chose for it, and the second argument is the text we want it to put out in the document.

Now, whenever we type \TUG in our document, the complete name will appear. If we later decide to change the name or its formatting, we just need to change this \newcommand line. Then it will be applied for the complete document.

You may use formatting commands inside your command definition. Let's say you would like to change the formatting of all occurrences of this name to be typeset in small caps...

\usepackage{xspace} tells LaTeX to load the package called xspace and to read in all of its definitions. From now on we may use all commands contained in that package. This package provides the command \xspace that inserts a space depending on the following character: If a dot, a comma, an exclamation, or a quotation mark follows, it won't insert a space, but if a normal letter follows, then it will. Usually, that's exactly what we want.

Imagine you've mentioned the TUG several...

Let's look at the highlighted line in the code. The number 1 in the square brackets marks the number of arguments that we want to use in the command. #1 will be replaced by the value of the first argument. #2 would refer to a second argument, and so on.

Now if you want to modify the appearance of all keywords to be italic, just modify the definition of \keyword and the change will be global.

In one preceding example, we've used \newcommand with two arguments...

Let's look again at the bold marked line in the code. By using [\bfseries], we introduced an optional parameter. We refer to it with #1. Its default value is \bfseries. Since we used a declaration this time, we added a pair of braces to ensure that only the keyword is affected by the declaration.

Later in the document, we gave [\itshape] to \keyword, changing the default formatting to italics.

Here's the definition of the \newcommand:

\newcommand{command}[arguments][optional]{definition}

We used the command \parbox to create a column. We stated the width of 3 cm in the first argument and the contained text in the second argument to \parbox.

\parbox takes the argument text and formats the output to fit the specified width. We see that the text is fully justified. Our example shows an obvious problem: insisting on full justification could lead to undesirable big gaps in the text. Possible solutions are:

We will check out all of...

By using \begin{minipage}, we started a "page in a page". We specified the width of 3cm by the mandatory argument. From this point onwards, the text lines will have a width of 3cm. They will be automatically wrapped and fully justified. We ended this restriction with \end{minipage}. Any text typed afterwards would run over the complete body text width.

Note: There won't be a page break in such a "minipage".

Have you been a hero struggling with the \parbox and all of its optional arguments? The minipage environment accepts all those arguments as well with the same meaning.

If you look at longer texts, you will notice that it's outstanding how the text is fully justified by LaTeX and how the spacing between words is evenly distributed on the lines. If necessary, LaTeX will divide words and put hyphens at the end of the line in order to break the lines in a better way. LaTeX already uses very good algorithms to hyphenate words, but it may happen that it can't find an acceptable way to divide a word. The...

We've told LaTeX that the word acronym may have a division point between acro and nym. That means a hyphen might be put after acro at the end of the line and nym goes to the following line.

The \hyphenation command tells LaTeX where the division points of a word may be. Its argument may contain several words separated by spaces. For each word, we can indicate several points. For instance we could extend the argument by more division points and more word variants like this:

\hyphenation{ac-ro-nym ac-ro-nym-ic a-cro-nym-i-cal-ly}

You could also indicate division points in the body text by inserting a backslash followed...

We have loaded the microtype package without any options, relying on its default behavior. It introduces font expansion to tweak the justification and uses hanging punctuation to improve the optical appearance of the margins. This may reduce the need of hyphenation and improves the "grayness" of the output. You've seen its effect on a narrow column—imagine the improvement on wide text—keep that in mind and try it out later!

Though microtype provides powerful features and options for the advanced typesetter, we usually won't need to do more than just load it to profit from it. There's an extensive package documentation if you want to study it in depth.

microtype does nice tweaking, but it's not a cure-all; we should still take care of proper hyphenation...

The very short command \\ ended a line; the following text was put to the next line. That's different to a paragraph break: we're still in the same paragraph. The command called \newline has the same effect.

There's another command called \linebreak, which tells LaTeX to end the line but to keep the full justification. Therefore, the space between the words would be stretched to reach the right margin. This could cause unpleasant gaps—that's why that command is rarely used.

By left-clicking the mouse in the output window, you activated TeXworks' magnifying glass. It allows inspecting the output in detail as the area around the mouse pointer will be enlarged. You can see that two or even three letters have been joined, but not in the last line: the command \/ prevented this.

If the letter i follows...

The first step shows typical text and its output. As you can see, LaTeX adds a little space after the...

We used the command \ldots to print out an ellipsis—three consecutive dots with a wider spacing. Such dots may indicate a pause, an unfinished thought, or an omitted word. When we just accumulated dots, they were typeset tightly together. However, it's common to print those dots wider.

Some languages have letters with accents that you can't simply type with your editor. In case you need to write such letters: let's see how to do it.

LaTeX provides some special commands to produce a variety of accents. They may be combined with any letter. Such a command consists of a backslash followed by one character. The accent will be put above or below the letter that has to follow in curly braces. The following table will list these commands and their effect:

It might be a bit cumbersome to use those accent commands. There's a package that extends LaTeX basic capabilities. It allows you to enter at least some commonly used accented and other special characters directly.

We loaded the inputenc package. The option utf8 tells the package to use Unicode input encoding, which provides many more symbols than just the ASCII code. Now we just need to find the symbol on the keyboard and to type it.

TeXworks supports Unicode/UTF-8. Depending on operating system and editor, you might need to use another option when loading inputenc. A rule of thumb: utf8 works on most Linux and Unix systems, like Mac OS X, and latin1 works with most Windows editors.

We inserted the declaration \raggedright . From this point onwards, the text will be ragged-right. In other words, the text will be moved to the left margin - "flushed-left". There won't be hyphenation.

Because we used this declaration inside a box, it's only valid there, like inside environments. After the box, the text will be fully justified again.

If we want the whole document to be ragged-right, we just need to use \raggedright in our preamble.

There might be occasions when we would like to achieve the opposite effect...

Because only the title should be centered, we opened a group to limit the centering. Through the declaration \centering , we made the remaining text of this group horizontally aligned to the center. We inserted a paragraph break: it's always a good idea to do it before ending the group when paragraph-affecting commands were used. By the brace after \today , we ended the group. If you complement some following text, it will be typeset normally, not centered.

\centering is commonly used when pictures or tables are inserted, further on title pages and...

We began with \noindent avoiding the paragraph indentation. \begin{center} started the center environment. It begins a new paragraph, leaving some space to the preceding text. \end{center} ended this environment. We used the environment twice. In the second one, we inserted \\ to end the verses.

After the center environment ended, some space followed...

Firstly we quoted inline. `produced a left quotation mark; the character is also called a backtick . 'gave a right quotation mark. We just typed two such symbols to get double quotes.

Then we used the quote environment to display a quotation. We did not begin a new paragraph for it, because the quotation is already set a bit off. That's the reason we don't use a blank line before and after the environment.

When writing short quotations, the quote environment looks...

The highlighted line shows that we've loaded the parskip package. Its only purpose is to remove the paragraph indentation completely. At the same time, this package introduces a skip between paragraphs. But this package doesn't affect the definition of the quotation environment—you still could use the quote environment.

In order...