Latex: A text-processing system

One of the most useful utilities of personal computers is the facility it

provides for preparing attractive documents with a variety of fonts and other

features like tables and graphics. Word processors like Wordstar, MS Word, and

Corel Wordperfect provide a WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) environment,

where you can format documents as you want. The flip side is that you may get

lost in making documents look appealing rather than concentrate on the content.

Also, managing large documents using word-processing systems can be tedious.

Text processing or typesetting is an alternative approach towards producing

flattering documents. Here, text that forms a document is entered in a normal

ASCII text file using an editor like Notepad, Edit or vi. Along with the text,

some special control codes or typesetting commands are inserted at appropriate

places to tell the logical structure of the document. For example, a command may

tell that a new section has started or that certain text needs to be emphasized.

This is very similar to HTML tags but here the control codes convey some

different information.

Describing the logical structure of a document rather than the formatting has

many advantages. It makes your documents much more coherent and enables you to

write more effectively. And changing the formatting of the document becomes

easy. For example, if you want all headings to be displayed in a manner

different than the default, you need to change the definition of the heading

style, rather than make changes at all places in the document. This input file

is now processed by the text-processing system to produce a document in

printable form.

Many text-processing systems are available under various platforms, like

troff, Tex, and Latex. Latex is the most widely used.

Where it’s used

Latex is being widely used in typesetting books, papers in scientific

journals, newsletters and articles. Latex is based on a typesetting system

called Tex (pronounces tech), which was developed by Donald Knuth of the

Stanford University. Tex, though powerful, by itself is difficult to use. So

Leslie Lamport created a macro package for Tex to ease the creation of documents

by providing a higher level of abstraction.

This package, called Latex (pronounced latech) provides a number of document

styles that determine exactly how your document will be formatted. Furthermore,

there are a number of commands for describing the various constituents of the

document like sections, subsections, tables, and figures.

Installation

To start with Latex, you first need to install the Latex system and the

associated programs. If you are using Linux, then the Latex system is available

on the RedHat Linux CD-ROM. The Latex implementation on Linux is called tetex,

so you can install all the tetex RPM packages to get started with Latex. You

will also need to install the GhostScript and GhostView (gv) packages. These are

required to view the PostScript file that Latex will produce.

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