Creating Professional Quality Documents with LaTeX

Creating documents is almost analogous to using Microsoft Word or other such word processing applications; however, most documents in academia and most books aren't created using word processors. Book publishers format manuscripts (which are typically written in word processors) sent by authors. Hence, the seemingly mysterious art of document typesetting is unknown to may. Using LaTeX, a document typesetting system that has some semblance to creating documents with HTML, it is possible to create professional quality documents.

Before delving into the specifics of using LaTeX, it is instructive to know why LaTeX is superior at creating documents. Some key factors are its strong dependence on structure (that is, you define a paragraph by calling the block of text a paragraph), automatic hyphenation (where words are broken off to adhere to a constant spacing between words), and math typesetting (formulas, equations). Such features are lacking, and if not lacking, not evident in most word processors.

LaTeX is written is plain text and is compiled into PDF, DVI, PS and other such files. The bare essentials for creating documents with LaTeX is a text editor (Notepad, Notepad++, Geany) and a TeX system (MikTeX for Windows, MacTeX for Mac OSX, and TeX Live for Unixes). However, it is helpful to have a editor especially built for LaTeX editing with buttons to type repetitive text and code completion. Some such editors are Kile for Linux, TeXnicCenter for Windows, and TeXShop for Mac OSX.

After obtaining a TeX system, and an editor, you can create documents with LaTeX. The markup of LaTeX is similar to that of HTML ( and in HTML are similar to \begin{document} and \end{document} in LaTeX). For beginning LaTeX, it is useful to have templates so that one may create documents without fully learning the syntax. A simple template for a document is given below.

\documentclass[12pt, letterpaper]{article}
\begin{document}
\title{Document Title}
\author{John Smith}
\date{\today}
\maketitle

LaTeX is great for creating professional quality documents.

\end{document}

Paste the above selection into your editor of choice and then compile it into PDF or any other format using
a Build or any other similar command. Upon viewing the output, you should see a document with a title, author name, date, and some content. As seen in the code, LaTeX forces the user to structurally define document elements (\title{} for title, \author{} for author, and so on). Typing math is also possible by adding to the code above.

\documentclass[12pt, letterpaper]{article}
\begin{document}
\title{Document Title}
\author{John Smith}
\date{\today}
\maketitle

LaTeX is great for creating professional quality documents.

\begin{equation}
x=\frac{-b \pm \sqrt{b^2 - 4ac}}{2a}
\end{equation}

\end{document}

Upon compiling the code above, you should see the addition of a math equation (quadratic equation). A lengthy tutorial would be required to explore and learn the many features of LaTeX, but the initial template can be used to creat many documents, if you know some simple commands.

• The command for italics is \textit{some text here}, bold font is \textbf{some text here}, underline is \underline{some text here}, and for all caps is \textsc{some text here}.
• Quotes in LaTeX are `` (two presses of the key above tab) and '' (two regular single quotes).
• To type dollar sign, you have to use \$, and \%, \#, for percent and hash mark, respectively.
• A paragraph is enclosed within a \paragraph{paragraph text here}.

To learn more about LaTeX, http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~dwilkins/LaTeXPrimer/ is a good resource and if you prefer a GUI based program, then LyX might suit your preference. LaTeX does have a relatively steep learning curve, but it is very capable when dealing with professional quality documents or typing mathematics. It is almost a de facto standard in academic papers and is free to use for many operating systems. For more information on LaTeX, visit http://www.latex-project.org/.