What is LaTeX ?
LaTeX is a highly efficient document preparation system developed by Leslie Lamport. It all started when the legendary author Donald Kunth was writing the second volume of The Art of Computer Programming. The lack of a good type-setting system led him to develop Tex and release it as free software. LaTeX can be thought of as a Tex extension intended for UNIX systems. Like Tex, LaTeX is also free software, released under the LaTeX Project public License (LPPL).Why use LaTex ?
LaTeX (pronounced 'Lah-Tech or Lay-Tech'),which is extremely popular in academic and scientific communities due to its rich functionality. scientists prefer to create their research papers using LaTeX. LaTeX could even be used to design wedding cards and chess boards!One of the main advantages is that it helps type-set documents beautifully, especially technical documents:
- Mathematical formulas can easily be constructed using certain commands.
- Being a programming language, a user can easily modify its default behaviour.
- The availability of professionally crafted in-built layouts make a document really look as if it has been printed.
- Documents in PS or PDF formats can be easily generated.
What is Classed and packages ?
LaTeX Provides classed and packages for extending behaviour. A class is used to modify a document style.Beamer is one of the most popular LaTeX classes for creating presentation. Prosper is another widely used presentations-makeing class. Apart from these, LaTeX also provides a default slide class to create slides.
Packages can be added and used inside a document class. A package is used to provide some additional functionality to an existing document. For example, if you need to insert a picture, you have to include the graphics package (graphicx). For a document, there can only be a single class, but many packages can be used inside a class. Some commmonly used packages are:
- amsmath : Mathematical formula formatting.
- graphics : Handling imported images.
- fancyhdr: Used to insert custom headers
- makeidx: Used to build an index for a document.
- fontenc: Handling font encodings
Classes and packages are loaded with the following statements:
\documentclass [<options>]{<class>}
\usepackage [<options>]{<packages>}
"You want the latest version, download it from the Tux Users Group site (http://www.tug.org/texlive/)"
\documentclass [<options>]{<class>}
\usepackage [<options>]{<packages>}
"You want the latest version, download it from the Tux Users Group site (http://www.tug.org/texlive/)"
