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LaTeX Beginner's Guide

LaTeX Beginner's Guide

4.6 (20)
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LaTeX Beginner's Guide

LaTeX Beginner's Guide

4.6 (20)
Buy this Book

Overview of this book

LaTeX is high-quality Open Source typesetting software that produces professional prints and PDF files. However, as LaTeX is a powerful and complex tool, getting started can be intimidating. There is no official support and certain aspects such as layout modifications can seem rather complicated. It may seem more straightforward to use Word or other WYSIWG programs, but once you've become acquainted, LaTeX's capabilities far outweigh any initial difficulties. This book guides you through these challenges and makes beginning with LaTeX easy. If you are writing Mathematical, Scientific, or Business papers, or have a thesis to write, then this is the perfect book for you. LaTeX Beginner's Guide offers you a practical introduction to LaTeX with plenty of step-by-step examples. Beginning with the installation and basic usage, you will learn to typeset documents containing tables, figures, formulas, and common book elements like bibliographies, glossaries, and indexes and go on to managing complex documents and using modern PDF features. It's easy to use LaTeX, when you have LaTeX Beginner's Guide to hand. This practical book will guide you through the essential steps of LaTeX, from installing LaTeX, formatting, and justification to page design. Right from the beginning, you will learn to use macros and styles to maintain a consistent document structure while saving typing work. You will learn to fine-tune text and page layout, create professional looking tables as well as include figures and write complex mathematical formulas. You will see how to generate bibliographies and indexes with ease. Finally you will learn how to manage complex documents and how to benefit from modern PDF features. Detailed information about online resources like software archives, web forums, and online compilers completes this introductory guide. It's easy to use LaTeX, when you have LaTeX Beginner's Guide to hand.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
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LaTeX
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LaTeX
Credits
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Credits
About the Author
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About the Author
About the Reviewers
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About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
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www.PacktPub.com
Preface
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Preface
Lock Free Chapter
1
Getting Started with LaTeX
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Getting Started with LaTeX
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What is LaTeX?
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Installing LaTeX
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Time for action – installing TeX Live using the net installer wizard
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Time for action – installing TeX Live offline
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Creating our first document
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Time for action – writing our first document with TeXworks
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Summary
2
Formatting Words, Lines, and Paragraphs
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Formatting Words, Lines, and Paragraphs
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Understanding logical formatting
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Time for action – titling your document
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How LaTeX reads your input
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Time for action – trying out the effect of spaces, line breaks, and empty lines
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Time for action – writing special characters in our text
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Formatting text – fonts, shapes, and styles
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Time for action – tuning the font shape
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Time for action – switching to sans-serif and to typewriter fonts
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Time for action – switching the font family
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Time for action – exploring grouping by braces
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Time for action – exploring font sizes
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Time for action – using an environment to adjust the font size
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Saving time and effort – creating your own commands
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Time for action – creating our first command using it as anabbreviation
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Time for action – adding intelligent spacing to command output
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Time for action – creating a macro for formatting keywords
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Time for action – marking keywords with optional formatting
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Using boxes to limit the width of paragraphs
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Time for action – creating a narrow text column
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Time for action – using the minipage environment
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Breaking lines and paragraphs
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Time for action – stating division points for words
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Time for action – using microtype
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Time for action – using line breaks
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Exploring the fine details
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Time for action – exploring ligatures
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Time for action – using differently spaced dots
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Time for action – comparing dots to ellipsis
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Time for action – experimenting with accents
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Time for action – using accents directly
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Turning off full justification
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Time for action – justifying a paragraph to the left
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Time for action – centering a title
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Time for action – centering verses
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Displaying quotes
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Time for action – quoting a scientist
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Time for action – quoting TeX's benefits
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Time for action – spacing between paragraphs instead of indentation
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Summary
3
Designing Pages
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Designing Pages
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Defining the overall layout
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Time for action – writing a book with chapters
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Time for action – specifying margins
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Time for action – finding the geometry package manual
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Time for action – increasing line spacing
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Using class options to configure the document style
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Time for action – creating a two-column landscape document
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Creating a table of contents
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Time for action – adding a table of contents
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Time for action – shortening the table of content entries
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Designing headers and footers
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Time for action – customizing headers with the fancyhdr package
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Breaking pages
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Time for action – inserting page breaks
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Enlarging a page
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Time for action – sparing an almost empty page
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Using footnotes
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Time for action – using footnotes in text and in headings
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Time for action – redefining the footnote line
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Summary
4
Creating Lists
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Creating Lists
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Building a bulleted list
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Time for action – listing LaTeX packages
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Time for action – listing packages by topic
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Creating a numbered list
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Time for action – writing a step-by-step tutorial
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Customizing lists
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Time for action – shrinking our tutorial
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Time for action – modifying lists using enumitem
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Producing a definition list
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Time for action – explaining capabilities of packages
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Summary
5
Creating Tables and Inserting Pictures
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Creating Tables and Inserting Pictures
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Writing in columns
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Time for action – lining up information using the tabbing environment
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Time for action – lining up font commands
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Typesetting tables
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Time for action – building a table of font family commands
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Time for action – adding nicer horizontal lines with the booktabs package
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Time for action – merging cells
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Time for action – using the array package
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Time for action – merging cells using the multirow package
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Time for action – adding a caption to our font table
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Inserting pictures
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Time for action – including a picture
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Managing floating environments
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Time for action – letting a figure float
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Time for action – embedding a picture within text
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Summary
6
Cross-Referencing
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Cross-Referencing
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Setting labels and referencing
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Time for action – referencing items of a top list
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Producing intelligent page references
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Time for action – introducing variable references
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Time for action – referring cleverly
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Summary
7
Listing Content and References
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Listing Content and References
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Customizing the table of contents
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Time for action – refining an extensive table of contents
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Creating and customizing lists of figures
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Time for action – creating a list of diagrams
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Creating a list of tables
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Using packages for customization
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Generating an index
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Time for action – marking words and building the index
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Creating a bibliography
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Time for action – citing texts and listing the references
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Time for action – creating and using a BibTeX database
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Changing the headings
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Summary
8
Typing Math Formulas
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Typing Math Formulas
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Writing basic formulas
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Time for action – discussing quadratic equations and roots
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Customizing displayed formulas
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Time for action – typesetting multi-line formulas
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Fine-tuning formulas
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Building math structures
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Stacking expressions
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Writing theorems and definitions
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Summary
9
Using Fonts
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Using Fonts
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Preparing the encoding
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Time for action – directly using special characters
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Installing additional fonts
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Choosing the main font
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Time for action – comparing Computer Modern to Latin Modern
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Exploring the world of LaTeX fonts
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Summary
10
Developing Large Documents
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Developing Large Documents
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Splitting the input
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Time for action – swapping out preamble and chapter contents
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Creating front and back matter
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Time for action – adding a dedication and an appendix
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Designing a title page
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Time for action – creating a title page
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Working with templates
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Time for action – starting with a template
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Summary
11
Enhancing Your Documents Further
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Enhancing Your Documents Further
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Using hyperlinks and bookmarks
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Time for action – adding hyperlinks
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Time for action – customizing the hyperlink appearance
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Time for action – editing PDF metadata
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Benefitting from other packages
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Time for action – visiting the TeX Catalogue Online
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Time for action – installing a LaTeX package
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Designing headings
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Time for action – designing chapter and section headings
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Coloring your document
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Summary
12
Troubleshooting
chevron up
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Troubleshooting
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Understanding and fixing errors
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Time for action – interpreting and fixing an error
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Handling warnings
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Time for action – emphasizing on a sans-serif font
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Avoiding obsolete classes and packages
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General troubleshooting
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Summary
13
Using Online Resources
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Using Online Resources
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Web forums, discussion boards, and Q&A sites
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Time for action – asking a question online
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Frequently Asked Questions
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Mailing lists
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TeX user group sites
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Homepages of LaTeX software and editors
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LaTeX archives and catalogs
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Friends of LaTeX
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LaTeX blogs
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Summary
1
Pop Quiz Answers
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Pop Quiz Answers
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Chapter 2: Formatting Words, Lines, and Paragraphs
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Chapter 3: Designing Pages
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Chapter 4: Creating Lists
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Chapter 5: Creating Tables and Inserting Pictures
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Chapter 6: Cross-Referencing
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Chapter 7: Listing Content and References
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Chapter 8: Typing Math Formulas
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Chapter 9: Using Fonts
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Chapter 10: Developing Large Documents
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Chapter 11: Enhancing Your Documents Further
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Chapter 12: Troubleshooting
2
Index
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Index

Time for action – interpreting and fixing an error

Let's create a tiny test document. For sure you know those "Hello world!" printing programs—we shall write one in LaTeX. Though we are used to the uncommon capitalization used in the words TeX and LaTeX, we will now try if \Latex works as well.

  1. Create a new document containing these lines:

    \documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
\Latex\ says: Hello world!
\end{document}

  2. Typeset. LaTeX will stop and print out the following message:

    ! Undefined control sequence.

    l.3 \Latex

    \ says: Hello world!

  3. Click on the cancel icon in the upper-left corner of TeXworks to stop typesetting. Go to line 3, correct \Latex into \LaTeX and Typeset again. Now LaTeX produces output without an error:

What just happened?

LaTeX commands are case-sensitive. Because we did not respect that, LaTeX had to deal with a macro called \Latex, which is just unknown. As a command is also called a control sequence , we got the error Undefined control sequence.

If TeX encounters an error...

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