An Example Document
An Example Document
Leslie Lamport
January 21, 1994
This is an example input file. Comparing it with
the output it generates can show you how to
produce a simple document of your own.
1 Ordinary Text
The ends of words and sentences are marked
by spaces. It doesn't matter how many
spaces you type; one is as good as 100. The
end of a line counts as a space.
One or more blank lines denote the end
of a paragraph.
Since any number of consecutive spaces are treated
like a single one, the formatting of the input
file makes no difference to
LATEX, but it makes a difference to you. When you use
LATEX, making your input file as easy to read
as possible will be a great help as you write
your document and when you change it. This sample
file shows how you can add comments to your own input
file.
Because printing is different from typewriting,
there are a number of things that you have to do
differently when preparing an input file than if
you were just typing the document directly.
Quotation marks like
"this"
have to be handled specially, as do quotes within
quotes:
" `this' is what I just
wrote, not `that' ".
Dashes come in three sizes: an
intra-word
dash, a medium dash for number ranges like
1-2,
and a punctuation
dash-like
this.
A sentence-ending space should be larger than the
space between words within a sentence. You
sometimes have to type special commands in
conjunction with punctuation characters to get
this right, as in the following sentence.
Gnats, gnus, etc. all begin with G. You should check the spaces after periods when
reading your output to make sure you haven't
forgotten any special cases. Generating an
ellipsis
... with the right spacing around the periods requires
a special command.
LATEX interprets some common characters as
commands, so you must type special commands to
generate them. These characters include the
following:
$ & % # { and }.
In printing, text is usually emphasized with an
italic
type style.
A long segment of text can also be emphasized
in this way. Text within such a segment can be
given additional emphasis.
It is sometimes necessary to prevent LATEX from
breaking a line where it might otherwise do so.
This may be at a space, as between the "Mr." and
"Jones" in
"Mr. Jones", or within a word-especially when the word is a
symbol like
itemnum
that makes little sense when hyphenated across
lines.
Footnotes1
pose no problem.
LATEX is good at typesetting mathematical formulas
like
x−3y + z = 7
or
a1 > x2n + y2n > x′
or
(A, B) = ∑i ai bi .
The spaces you type in a formula are
ignored. Remember that a letter like
x is a formula when it denotes a mathematical
symbol, and it should be typed as one.
2 Displayed Text
Text is displayed by indenting it from the left
margin. Quotations are commonly displayed. There
are short quotations
This is a short a quotation. It consists of a
single paragraph of text. See how it is formatted.
and longer ones.
This is a longer quotation. It consists of two
paragraphs of text, neither of which are
particularly interesting.
This is the second paragraph of the quotation. It
is just as dull as the first paragraph.
Another frequently-displayed structure is a list.
The following is an example of an itemized
list.
- This is the first item of an itemized list.
Each item in the list is marked with a "tick".
You don't have to worry about what kind of tick
mark is used.
- This is the second item of the list. It
contains another list nested inside it. The inner
list is an enumerated list.
- This is the first item of an enumerated
list that is nested within the itemized list.
- This is the second item of the inner list.
LATEX allows you to nest lists deeper than
you really should.
This is the rest of the second item of the outer
list. It is no more interesting than any other
part of the item.
- This is the third item of the list.
You can even display poetry.
There is an environment
for verse
Whose features some poets will curse.
For instead of making
Them do all line breaking,
It allows them to put too many words on a line when they'd rather be
forced to be terse.
Mathematical formulas may also be displayed. A
displayed formula
is
one-line long; multiline
formulas require special formatting instructions.
Don't start a paragraph with a displayed equation,
nor make one a paragraph by itself.
Footnotes:
1This is an example of a footnote.